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FATAL

STRATEGIES

SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES

Originally published in 1983 as Les Strategies fatales by Editions Grasset, Paris.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo¬
copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Semiotext(e)

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www.semiotexte.com

Special thanks to Justin Cavin and Robert Dewhurst.

Cover Art by Matt Fishbeck. “We Never Close,” 2007.

Back Cover Photography by Marine Baudrillard
Design by Ffedi El Kholti

ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-061-3

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, and London, England
Printed in the United States of America

FATAL

STRATEGIES

Jean Baudrillard

Introduction by Dominic Pettman

Translated by by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski

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Contents

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy 7

Ecstasy and Inertia 25

Figures of the Transpolitical 45

Ironic Strategies 97

The Object and Its Destiny 141

For a Principle of Evil

219

Introduction

A Belated Invitation to the Orgy

“Too bad. Were in paradise.”
—Jean Baudrillard

WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED the writings of Jean Baudrillard, it
felt as if I had discovered the ideal life-coach for an age in which
life made very little sense. His various works appeared as an almost
seamless soliloquy, distributed over, and parceled into, a series of
books that functioned more as chapters in an overarching com¬
pendium, than discrete texts of their own. To step midway into
Baudrillard’s stream-of-consciousness, was to treat his compulsively
calm commentary on the present as an illuminating guide for the
perplexed. Indeed, few other thinkers could, to my mind, account
for the mystifying “events” that were claiming the attention of the
world at large at the time: Michael Jackson’s unfolding follies,
baroque conspiracy theories, newsless news reports, wars staged
for prime-time audiences, and pseudoscandals which seemed to
stimulate debate in direct inverse ratio to the changes they
inspired. To come of age in the late 1980 s and early 1990 s was to
find oneself in a sociopolitical echo chamber, robbed even of the
false promise of revolution, or compensatory hope of utopia. For

Baudrillard had insisted that this was indeed utopia: this lurching
tableaux of strip malls, Sony Walkman-cocooned joggers, terrorist-
themed fashion shows, designer painkillers, and poll results,
announced with obscene confidence into hushed clinical waiting
rooms. “The crisis of achieved utopia,” is one of the many names
Baudrillard christened the postmodern world, in which we were
now obliged to endure the consequences of getting what we had
collectively asked for. (The ultra-absorbent utility of Baudrillard’s
“we,” however, is something that his critics have rightly questioned.)
The orgy was over. Long live the orgy!

Revisiting Fatal Strategies fifteen years after the initial
encounter, and twenty-five years after it was first published in
France, I still have the sense that I am being introduced to an
unclouded and fearless perspective, intent on breaking the rules of
polite discourse by pointing out the strings, wires, smoke, and
mirrors that many of us have been trained not to notice. Bau¬
drillard’s words resonate with those troubled, inchoate intuitions
about the sinister mechanics of the system, bypassing the rational
methods and assumptions of his peers. (After all, Baudrillard was a
sociologist who had little patience with sociology.) The temptation
is to simplify the insights contained in his own countersystem, and
interpret the hyperreal condition as a political conspiracy or local-
izable menace, just as the Wachowski brothers did in their naive
homage to the great man, The Matrix. (As Baudrillard eventually
pointed out, The Matrix is the kind of film the Matrix itself would
have made about the Matrix.) Rescuing Baudrillard’s ideas from
caricature thus becomes a challenging and important task, now
that he is no longer with us.

One of Baudrillard’s final appearances in the US was at the New
School in New York, to deliver a paper entitled simply “Cannibal/

8 / Fatal Strategies

Carnival. A line of people extended out onto 12th Street and down
Sixth Avenue an hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin.
Those walking by were under the impression a rock concert was
imminent, as the auditorium, and then the overflow room, filled to
capacity, forcing disappointed punters of all ages to be turned away.
Clearly Baudrillard’s star had not dimmed, in spite of the ongoing
disdain sanctioned by fickle academic fashions. For while part of
this turnout could be explained by a morbid curiosity to see the last
of the living postmodern giants, there was also a genuine desire to
hear his pronouncements on the current “situation.”

But what does it mean to read Baudrillard not only after the
orgy, but after Baudrillard himself—now that his words have sadly
ceased midstream? 1 What kind of legacy has he left those who would
enter the remarkably comprehensive and coherent universe of his
ideas? Well, perhaps the most significant gift he has bequeathed his
readers is precisely that: a durable map of hyperreality on the same
1:1 scale as Borges’s map of the empire. Where hyperreality exactly
covers the territory of the real, Baudrillard s oeuvre exactly covers the
deterritorialized cartography of the hyperreal. In doing so, his books
function as sophisticated tools for navigating an age which has leap¬
frogged alienation to arrive at pure simulation.

What’s more (and this might seem a strange claim at face
value), Baudrillard has given us hope. Clearly noone could write
with such a poisonous pen unless it was Filled with the bile of his
own disillusionments and disappointments. To call him a lapsed
romantic is much too crude and misleading. However, there is an
aestheticism at work in his ideas—a belief in the potential of

1. Before he himself committed the “delinquency” of dying, Baudrillard had argued
that death had become the ultimate faux pas one can make nowadays.

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 9

changing course, “if only for the sake of change,” that appeals to
those cliche-phobic people who have managed to cut their own
beautiful souls like an umbilical cord. For instance, in reference to
wholly pessimistic readings of his statement that we are living post-
festurn , Baudrillard reminds us that a woman is whispering into the
man’s ear, “what are you doing after the orgy?” It is a potential ren¬
dezvous, an occasion to look forward to, and build toward: a slight
shift in perspective, which creates a more promising view of the orgy
itself. And so, by extending the poetic praxis of the Situationists into
his own complex vision of the enemy (no longer life-draining
Capital, but the biopolitical logic of the code), we find plenty of
room to breathe inside those same concepts which impatient and
obtuse readers simply dismiss as a litany of negative epiphanies.

Another great gift from Baudrillard is his style, which is nothing
if not seductive. His ideas are complex, but fit together perfectly,
like a particularly fiendish Chinese box. And like other great
thinkers, he creates his own vocabulary—often counterintuitive—
where “crisis” stands diametrically opposed to “catastrophe,”
“ceremony” to “spectacle,” and “domination” to “hegemony.” When
reading several titles in a row, his ideas can seem terribly repetitive.
And yet, his phrasing is so exquisite, his examples so compelling,
his rhetoric so uncompromising, that the diligent reader may feel
obliged to take notes by simply transcribing page for page. (Indeed,
were one to actually take the time to do so, then the strength of the
skeleton supporting the dance comes into sharper relief.)

No work was more important to Baudrillard himself than Fatal
Strategies , and it is indeed one of the best places to start for an
overview of his thought. Here in these pages we find a holographic
style; for the entire vision is contained in each fragment. From
whichever unit one might choose to approach it—the sentence, the

10/ Fatal Strategies

paragraph, the chapter, or the entire book—a crystallized sense of
the argument shines through. What is more, there is a fugue-like
persistence at work between the pages: a Pachelbel’s Canon of Gen¬
teel Disgust. Despite using academic language, and assuming some
familiarity with the history of ideas, this book is not at all obscure
or precious or esoteric. The author proceeds with the confidence of
someone who has much to say, and wants others to understand it.
To this end, he creates a formidably coherent textual universe; total¬
izing, despite—or due to—its reliance on paradox.

Along with Symbolic Exchange and Death , Fatal Strategies is one
of Baudrillard’s most emphatic and comprehensive statements. 2
Within these pages we are not only introduced to the key motifs
developed in this earlier book, during his post-Marxist rehab—
reversibility, value, impossible exchange, the object, transparency,
virtuality, chance, etc.—but we are also witness to the underlying
force (destiny/evil) which holds them together in the same constel¬
lation. Having previously noted that symbolic exchange is “a
functioning principle that is sovereignly external and antagonistic to
our economic ‘reality principle’” (SED, 120), Baudrillard goes on to
develop the ecstatic challenge of the “counter-gift” to the restricted
economy. Namely, that this anthropological specter cannot be
assimilated without damage to the commodity system, based as it is

2. Of course there is no consensus on Baudrillards key works, as illustrated by
Mark Posters description of Symbolic Exchange and Death as “bleak,” “pathetic”
and “flawed” in his overall positive introduction to Baudrillards Selected Writings
(5). Mike Gane, in contrast, describes it as “without doubt Jean Baudrillard’s most
important book” (viii). This new edition of Fatal Strategies will no doubt inspire
similar polaraties of opinion, while claiming its retrospecitve, prominent place
amongst his collected titles.

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 11

on utility, (re)production, exchange value, and profit. As a kind of
“accursed share,” the symbolic embodies the fatal strategy of
achieving liberation through “the deepening of negative conditions”
(223). In other words, the sociocybernetic code can successfully
absorb everything except a homeopathic dose of its own logic of
exclusion. Thus, the violence of the symbolic—the obligation to
reciprocate on levels deeper than objects tethered to exchange
value—haunts the diminished contemporary world in the way
kryptonite haunts Superman. The social law would have us believe
that time is linear, and that gifts are unilateral. However, a more
profound law invites the cyclical and the reversible to reenter the
frame from which they had been rudely excluded.

Reversibility, for instance, denotes the limit point in which all
alternative values spasm into their opposite: such as life and
death, good and evil, chance and fate, male and female, human
and inhuman, etc. As such, reversibility can also be considered a
strategy emerging from within any given arrangement: the imma¬
nent potential for subversion or metamorphosis. At the general level
of forms, and according the deeper laws of exchange mandated by
the symbolic, such binary oppositions do not progress in a linear
fashion, according to the dialectics of human history. Rather, they
push each other to the outer limits, the object barrier, of their own
moral values. No matter how we moderns strive to charge life with
the positive, and death with the negative, there is “a kind of univer¬
sal collusiveness of inseparable forms” (Pass 16-17) that makes a
mockery of our digital desire to sort the quick from the dead. As
such, the ideal Kantian subject is simply not qualified to parse a
world plagued by third order simulation technologies. How can one
argue rationally against “the malicious curvature that puts an end to
the horizon of meaning” (45)? One can’t. How can one definitively

12 / Fatal Strategies

decode a code based on signifiers sans signifieds? One cannot. Thus
every system is pregnant with the possibility that it will “overflow its
own reality principle and ... be refracted in another logic” (211).

Reality itself, then, is a victim of what Baudrillard would later
call “the perfect crime” (in which perfection itself—or at least the
attempt to achieve perfection—is the criminal). The hyperreal is not
an illusion. It is not a false world of Platonic cave shadows, from
which one could escape. It is the more real than real. Reality, as expe¬
rienced in the different classical times preceding postmodernism,
was indexed against illusion, dreams, art, magic. Today, reality has
been swallowed up and disappears in its own hyperbole, just as sex
disappears in porn, and events in the news. The traditional division
between culture and nature no longer holds in the hyperreal, since
both have been so thoroughly mediated. Virtual reality is thus both
an oxymoron and a tautology at the same time. For Baudrillard, this
calls for a “pataphysical” perspective: a concept taken from the
proto-Surrealist Alfred Jarry, whose writings promoted the “science
of imaginary solutions”: a counterintuitive, ametaphysical, rendering
of ruses, rules, predestinations, and interconnections. In a pata¬
physical climate, there is no foundation to distinguish between the
cosmic and the political, the real or imagined, so that each infects
the other in unprecedented ways.

Philosophizing with a Spanner

Fatal Strategies can therefore be read as a perverse manual of conduct,
pointing out common temptations and traps to avoid. I shall leave the
ever-green, ever-vexed question of the “lived” or practical application
of theory aside, and rather note that Baudrillard’s playbook initially

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 13

disorients and then liberates, as it introduces the reader to a procession
of ideas, blasphemous to both the secular priests of high reason and the
neoromantic revolutionaries of the various “isms” of our time.

Inscribed within the title is a paradox and a pun. The paradox
involves the nature of the conjunction, for as Baudrillard himself
asks explicitly in the concluding pages, “how could there be fatal¬
ity if there is strategy?” By what “sarcastic variable” could the
strategic be figured as a subspecies of fate, or vice versa? Herein lies
the enigma that powers not only this book, but Baudrillard’s entire
wager of believing “for a single instant the hypothesis that there is
a fatal and enigmatic bias in the order of things.” To do so is to
throw into question all the fixed cultural algorithms the culture
has relied upon to sort “right” from “wrong,” and distribute guilt
or blame where necessary: “We have abolished the real world,”
wrote Nietzsche, “what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?

... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent
world !” 3 (Nietzsche cast a long and cooling shadow over Bau¬
drillard’s work.) 4 The pun embedded in the title, on the other
hand, concerns the duel use of “fatal,” meaning primarily fate-as-
destiny, but also the symbolically lethal forces described in his
earlier works: Freud’s death-drive detourned toward objects and
forms, rather than to biographical beings.

3. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ , trans. RJ Hollingdale (London: Pen¬
guin Books, 1990), p.51.

4. A less noted influence is Theodor Adorno, whose Mandarin melancholy could
be read as a precedent to Baudrillard s project: “Art is least to be saved by stuffing
the extinct subject like a museum piece, and the object, the purely inhuman, which
alone is worthy of art today, escapes its reach at once by excess and inhumanity”
{Minima Moralia: Reflections of a Damaged Life, Verso, 2005, p. 145).

14 / Fatal Strategies

Baudrillard dismisses current critical radicality as “useless.”
Certainly it takes courage to claim ones own system as the antidote
to banality and denounce dialectics as obsolete. But it isn’t just a
flippant statement on his part. The multipolar polemic of Fatal
Strategies begins by noting that, “Things have found a way of
avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them.”
In other words, the rhetorical and/or revolutionary strategy of
opposition is now corrupt and paralyzed, so that it has become
necessary—in an age of rampant indeterminism—to deepen nega¬
tive conditions until they flip, according to the cultural-cosmic
principles or reversibility detailed throughout. (A point pushed by
ZiZek a decade or so later.) Fatal strategies themselves differ from
other such techniques, such as Machiavelli’s or Sun Tzu’s, in that
they are not about securing the sovereignty or prosperity of the
subject, but are deployed by forces enigmatic to us: evil genies, sly
objects, ironic events, and spanners in the works which escape the
centripetal will and best laid plan’s of the individual.

We are thus witness to “a dizzying overmultiplication of formal
qualities.” All the elements of our world—science, politics, fashion,
love—have become prey to a flabby hyperdeterminacy (which is
equivalent to indeterminacy). This in turn leads to “the frenzy to
explain everything, attribute everything, footnote everything.”
Fatal strategies, in contrast, are those phenomena that slip away
from the harsh light of interrogation, the presumption of explana¬
tion, and the tyranny of causality. Meanwhile, human activity
continues to unfold in a kind of endless extratime, in which the
results are meaningless, because no one can remember what they
are playing for. “The worst thing,” writes Baudrillard, “is that
there is no Promethean challenge involved here, no excess of passion
or pride. It simply seems that the species has crossed some specific,

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 15

mysterious point, from which it is impossible to retreat, decelerate
or slow down.” To put it somewhat differently, the audience col¬
lectively feels de trop, yet stubbornly refuses to leave after the
credits have rolled.

Going back is certainly not an option. Neither is allowing things
to continue in their default trajectory. One difficult question is the
degree to which the eponymous fatal strategies belong to “us” humans
(potentially at least), and to what extent we are merely caught in their
logic. Take the example of terrorism, which had a different tenor
during the time of composition (the most visible form being left-wing
extremism such as the Red Brigade), but nevertheless continues to
have the same structural relationship to the media, the masses, and
the State. Baudrillard argues that to take a hostage is to wrench
someone from their own fate, so that they are suspended—“neither
dead nor alive.” From a “fatal” perspective, we are all hostages,
stripped of our symbolic connection to death and destiny by the
infantile demand for security. In a passage which echoes uncannily
through the halls of the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Bau¬
drillard asks: “what kind of State would be capable of dissuading
and annihilating all terrorism in the bud? It would have to arm itself
with such terrorism and generalize terror on every level. If this is the
price of security, is everybody deep down dreaming of this?” 5

5. In 2003, Baudrillard revisited the question of terrorism, post-September 11,
with a brilliant reading of the “retrospective” and “preventative” counterterror of
the US and its epigones: “There is a ferocious irony here: an antiterrorist world
system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting terror on itself and emptying
itself of all political substance—to the point of turning against its own popula¬
tion” {In the Shadow of the Silent Majority , 115). Yet this is where power also
becomes “spectral and vulnerable.”

16 / Fatal Strategies

Terrorism is not something Baudrillard advocates on an indi¬
vidual, pragmatic level. He is certainly not asking his readers to
hijack planes. And yet he understands the symbolic and semiotic
conditions which summoned it into existence. When the drama of
alienation gives way to the melodrama of terrorism, Baudrillard is
bold enough to point out the silver lining. “It is worse than the
one that replaces it, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia
and the ruses of history.”

Fatal strategies are beyond human control, since they seem to be
woven into the quantum fabric of the cosmos. That mysterious
would-be holistic entity known as “the world,” will—it seems—con¬
tinue to use its own diabolical techniques to thwart human hubris
and lack of imagination (which may or may not amount to the same
thing). For instance, the object may only pretend to obey the laws of
physics, “because it gives so much pleasure to the observer.” Some
scientists would probably throw the book across the room at such a
suggestion. The silent majority, however, may read on intrigued.

On the level of the individual then, fatal strategies are secret
social tendencies or cosmic “objective” ironies which can provide
a model for how to approach certain situations. One can, for
instance, refuse to treat seduction as a narcissistic game of capture
and control (as Don Juan might), and rather consider it as a way
to “soak pleasure from this charming and absurd difference that
nature has put between the sexes.” How successful one might be
in replacing the obscene, demanding (and intrinsically alienating)
discourse of love with the subtle, challenging (and inherently
inclusive) challenge of seduction, is no means certain, given the
cultural pressures set up against it. No doubt the stakes are against
such an endeavor, given that the free-floating “ecological libido” of
modern times represents “a product specific to our epoch, spread

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 17

out everywhere in homeopathic and homeostatic doses ....
[which] can be drained, diverted, magnetized from one niche to
another, according to the flow. It corresponds ideally to an order
of manipulation.” And yet, Baudrillard suggests, merely register¬
ing a willingness to change the rules of erotic engagement, to
tinker with the semiotic code, and alter the assumptions they rep¬
resent, has the potential to transform human intimacy beyond the
unthinking form of personal blackmail that it has largely become.

On the level of the masses, it matters little what any given
individual seeks to achieve in terms of strategic behavior. Taken
collectively, the masses are themselves a transpolitical condition,
and thus a stronger medium than all the media. That is to say, they
comprise a kind of headless body, whose radical passivity absorbs
all attempts at manipulation from above through gestalt apathy,
thus reversing the flow of power, which traditionally relies on at
least a modicum of civic consciousness. Woven throughout such a
scandalous view of the populace, however, is a challenge, should
we decide to read it along a certain grain. The text notes:

Publicity, abstract, abject circulation of Eurodollars, stock
prices, immorality of fashion cycles, useless technologies of
prestige, electoral parades, arms escalation, all this is not only
the historical sign of the domination of capital, but the most
decisive proof of a fact more important than capital itself: no
social project worthy of the name has ever really existed, that
in the end no group has ever really conceived itself as social,
that is to say in solidarity with its own values and coherent in
its collective project, in short, there has never been even the
shadow nor the embryo of a responsible collective subject,
nor even the possibility of an objective of this kind. (101-102)

18 / Fatal Strategies

What may sound like a categorical dismissal of politics, anthro¬
pology, history—in fact, the entire set of Enlightenment trading
cards—can be, from a different angle, considered a starting point
for an unprecedented rethinking of what it means to exist as a
social being without a society of any traditional description.
Indeed, the important question of what it means to belong, in an
age which has pushed far beyond alienation, has been taken up by
contemporary Continental political philosophers, often via the
trope of the “multitude.” Thinking through the possibility of a
“community-of-those-who-have-nothing-in-common”—along
with the conditions which block this possibility—is a supremely
challenging task. Baudrillard’s ideas will have to be reread in the
light of this seemingly endless “state of exception” (a phrase men¬
tioned more than once in Fatal Strategies , and deployed most
recently by Giorgio Agamben).

The Last Laugh

“This revolution will not be symbolic, dazzling, and subjec¬
tive, but obscure and ironic. It won’t be dialectical, it will be
fatal.”

—Jean Baudrillard

Half-way through Fatal Strategies, the author insists: “This is not
...a cynical philosophical view, but an objective view of societies,
and possibly of all systems of thought. The energy itself is cynical
and immoral.” In other words: “You must be cynical or perish.”
The choice between cynicism or death is not one peddlers of emo
music or “the new sincerity” care to contemplate these days.

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 19

However, the mistake is to think of this stance as inimical to what
Bataille called “the practice of joy before death.” Indeed, Bau-
drillard’s entire project can be glimpsed in his firm belief that
“there is perhaps another, more joyous way of seeing things, and
of finally substituting for eternally critical theory an ironic theory”
(120). The task is thus to be more cynical than cynical, in a global
culture which is more real than real. Hence his habit of promoting
ideas, “if only for the sake of change”: a noble attempt, in an age
of simulated novelty and profound stagnation; where the Eternal
Return has been replaced by the Eternal Rerun. But if radical pes¬
simism has the latent ability to “save us,” is there not a subtext of
salvation running through Baudrillard’s narrative? And how does
this messianic trope square with his impatience toward the various
cargo cults (evangelism, capitalism, etc.) attempting to thaw the
cryogenically frozen body of history? 6

Indeed, it seems at times that this author cannot shake off the
soixante-huitard advocation of action: “We need to coalesce all the
centrifugal forces to escape from this force of inertia” (125). Then
again, such words may represent merely a description of our
dilemma, in the free indirect mode. Were Baudrillard still here to
put us straight on this question, it would be surprising to hear an
unambiguous answer, for that would be to smother the fatal force
of its challenge. After all, the function of polite (i.e., neutralized)
communication is transparency—something Baudrillard considered
the most sterile form of evil yet concocted. “[Sjynthesis is a soft
solution; dialectics a nostalgic one. The only radical and modern
answer: potentiate what is new, original, unexpected ...”

6. It is surely significant that, in the watershed year of 1968, Baudrillard translated
W. E. Miihlmann’s Les Messianismes Revolutionnaires.

20 / Fatal Strategies

Baudrillard’s list of targets includes psychoanalysis,
moralism, “America,” second-wave feminism, pornography,
cloning, false radicality... even yoga! In their stead, he seeks
to locate a genuine revolution, on a scale or front that we—
as the species-centric being par excellence —have not
anticipated. Namely, the “insurrection of the object,” which
he describes as “a silent revolution, but the only one left
now.” The fate of the object is one strategy which, according
to this book, has long languished unclaimed in the Lost &
Found office of radical ideas; at least until now. And for this
reason alone, it is a useful expansion of agency beyond the
rather self-serving principles of the human subject. “Only the
subject desires; only the object seduces” (141). 7

Consistent to the end—and even in the last years of his life—
Baudrillard shruggingly acknowledged the possibility of “a
confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysi¬
cal and symbolic in the strong sense.” As the West continues to
both carnivalize and cannibalize itself under the self-appointed
mandate of an endless and abstract “war on terror,” the oppressed,
exploited and colonized suffer from “a kind of enormous Stock¬
holm syndrome,” parroting the values of those who hold them
hostage, both economically and ethically. And yet, just as he did a
couple of decades earlier in Fatal Strategies, the great pataphysician
sees an ongoing “justice in reversibility.” 8

7. In a later interview, Baudrillard admitted that a fatal strategy is “not really
strategy. That’s a play on words to dramatize the total passage from the subject to
the object” (95).

8. “Cannibal/Carnival.” Unpublished paper, delivered at New School (November
4, 2005).

Introduction: A Belated Invitation to the Orgy / 21

The strategies Baudrillard documented so well, in an attempt
to marshal them into some kind of beneficial pattern, for the sake
of a new and vital currency, continue to pulse today without their
master of ceremonies. Thankfully we can confidently assume that
worldly ruses and cosmic twists are still in store. Baudrillard was
many things to many people: a prophet of the present, a writer of
science fiction, the most quotable thinker since Nietzsche, an
alchemist who managed to leach every last drop of sentimentali¬
ty out of nostalgia, the original Ronin of critical theory, and a
man who talked incessantly about the power of silence. The crys¬
talline, high-altitude pleasure of reading this particular book is
the clarity of being liberated from banal hope, and ushered
toward a more fatal kind of orientation toward the future. Rec¬
ognizing and appreciating the difference between a fatal strategy,
and common-or-garden fatalism , is the challenge that Baudrillard
himself has left us.

— Dominic Pettman

Dominic Pettman is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene
Lang College, New School for Liberal Studies. He is the author of After the
Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion, Love and Other Technologies: Retro¬
fitting Eros for the Information Age, and the co-author of Avoiding the Subject:
Media, Culture and the Object, with Justin Clemens.

22 / Fatal Strategies

Ecstasy and Inertia

THINGS HAVE FOUND A WAY of avoiding a dialectics of meaning
that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating indefinitely,
increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in an ascension to
the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent
finality and senseless reason.

But nothing prevents us from assuming that we could obtain the
same effects in reverse—another unreason, also triumphant. Unrea¬
son is victorious in every sense, which is the very principle of Evil.

The world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to
equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or
synthesis. This is also the principle of Evil, as expressed in the “evil
genie” of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object and in
its strategy, victorious over that of the subject.

We will find subtle forms of radicalizing secret qualities; we will
fight obscenity with its own weapons. To the truer than true we will
oppose the falser than false. We will not oppose the beautiful to the
ugly, but will look for the uglier than ugly: the monstrous. We will
not oppose the visible to the hidden, but will look for the more
hidden than hidden: the secret.

We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the
fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile:

metamorphosis... We will not distinguish the true from the false,
but will look for the falser than false: illusion and appearance....

In this ascent to extremes, we should perhaps radically oppose
obscenity and seduction; but, perhaps, their effects are cumulative.

We will be looking for something faster than communication:
challenge, the duel. Communication is too slow; it is an effect of
slowness, working through contact and speech. Looking is
much faster; it is the medium of the media, the most rapid one.
Everything must come into play instantaneously. We never com¬
municate. In the to-and-fro of communication, the instantaneity
of looking, light and seduction is already lost.

But against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will
also look for slowness—not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but
insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence,
inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a
secret here too.

Just as the model is truer than true (being the quintessence of the
significant features of a situation), and thus procures a vertiginous
sensation of truth, fashion has the fabulous character of the more
beautiful than beautiful: fascinating. The seduction it exerts is
independent of all value judgement. It surpasses the aesthetic form
in the ecstatic form of unconditional metamorphosis.

The ecstatic is an immoral form, while the aesthetic form
always implies the moral distinction between the beautiful and the
ugly. If there is a secret to fashion, beyond its own particular plea¬
sures of art and taste, it is this immorality, this sovereignty of
ephemeral models, this fragile and total passion that excludes all
sentiment, this arbitrary metamorphosis, superficial and regulated,
that excludes all desire (unless that is what desire is).

26 / Fatal Strategies

If that is desire, nothing prevents us from imagining that in the
social, in politics and in all domains other than dress, desire also
preferably turns to immoral forms, equally affected by this same
potential denial of all value judgement and much more bound to
that ecstatic destiny which tears things away from their “subjective”
quality and leaves them to the sole attraction of the redoubled trait,
of the redoubled definition that tears them away from their “objec¬
tive” causes and surrenders them to the sole power of their
unleashed effects.

Every trait thus raised to the superlative power, caught up in a
spiral of redoubling—the truer than true, the more beautiful than
beautiful, the realer than real—is assured of having an effect of
vertigo independent of any content or quality of its own. This
effect today tends to become our only passion. A passion for
intensifying, for escalation, for an increase in power, for ecstasy—
for any quality at all, provided that, ceasing to be relative to its
opposite (the true to the false, the beautiful to the ugly, the real to
the imaginary) it becomes superlative, positively sublime, as if it
had absorbed all the energy of its opposite. Imagine a thing of
beauty that has absorbed all the energy of the ugly: that’s fashion....
Imagine the true that has absorbed all the energy of the false: there
you have simulation.

Seduction itself is vertiginous in that it is achieved not by an
effect of simple attraction, but by the redoubled attraction of a sort
of challenge, or a fatality of its essence—“I’m not beautiful; I’m
worse,” said Marie Dorval.

We have passed alive into the models. We have passed alive into
fashion and into simulation. Perhaps Roger Caillois was correct in
his terminology, and our entire culture is in the process of slipping

Ecstasy and Inertia / 27

from competitive and expressive games to games of chance and
vertigo. The very uncertainty about the purpose of it all pushes us
toward a dizzying over-multiplication of formal qualities, and
therefore to the form of ecstasy. Ecstasy is the quality proper to any
body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its
pure and empty form. Fashion is the ecstasy of the beautiful: pure
and empty form of an aesthetic spinning about itself. Simulation is
the ecstasy of the real: just look at television, where real events follow
each other in a perfectly ecstatic relation, that is, in dizzying,
stereotyped, unreal and recurrent ways that allow their senseless
and uninterrupted concatenation. In ecstasy: this is the object in
advertising, as is the consumer in contemplation of the advertise¬
ment—the spinning of use-value and exchange-value into
annihilation in the pure and empty form of the brand-name.

But we must go further: antipedagogy is the ecstatic—that is, pure
and empty—form of pedagogy. Antitheater is the ecstatic form of
theater: no more stages or scenes, no more content, but theater in
the street, actor-less, theater of all for all, which even becomes con¬
fused with the regular unfolding of our lives without illusion.
Where is the power of illusion if it delights in retracing our daily
life and transfiguring our workplace?

Yet this is precisely how and where today’s art seeks to go
beyond itself, to deny itself, and the more it seeks to fulfill itself in
this way, the more hyperreal it becomes and the more it transcends
itself towards its empty essence. There is vertigo here too, vertigo,
mise en abyme, and stupefaction. Nothing did more to stupefy the
creative act, to make it shine resplendent in its pure and inane
form, than suddenly to exhibit, as Duchamp did, a bottle rack in
an art gallery. The ecstasy of a common object at the same time

28 / Fatal Strategies

pushes the pictorial act to its ecstatic form—without an object, it
will spin about itself and in some sense disappear, but not without
exerting on us a definitive fascination. Today art no longer creates
anything but the magic of its disappearance.

Imagine a good resplendent with all the power of Evil: this is
God, a perverse god creating the world on a dare and calling on it
to destroy itself....

What might also make us wonder is this going beyond the social,
the irruption of the more social than social—the mass; this is a
social that has absorbed all the inverse energies of the antisocial, of
inertia, resistance and silence. Here the logic of the social reaches
its limit—the point where it inverts its finalities and reaches its
point of inertia and extermination, but at the same time approaches
ecstasy. Masses are the ecstasy of the social, the ecstatic form of the
social, the mirror where it is reflected in all its immanence.

The real does not efface itself in favor of the imaginary; it effaces
itself in favor of the more real than real: the hyperreal. The truer
than true: this is simulation.

Presence does not efface itself before emptiness, but before a
redoubling of presence which effaces the opposition between
presence and absence.

Nor does the empty efface itself before the full, but before
repletion and saturation—the fuller than full. This is the reac¬
tion of the body in obesity, of sex in obscenity: an abreaction to
the void.

Movement does not disappear as much into immobility as into
speed and acceleration—into the more mobile than movement, so
to speak, which pushes it to the limit while stripping it of sense.

Ecstasy and Inertia / 29

Sexuality does not fade into sublimation, repression and
morality, but fades much more surely into the more sexual than
sex: porn, the hypersexuality contemporaneous with the hyperreal.

More generally things visible do not come to an end in obscu¬
rity and silence—instead they fade into the more visible than
visible: obscenity.

An example of this ex-centricity of things, of this drift into
excrescence, is the irruption, into our system, of chance, indeter¬
minacy and relativity. The reaction to this new state of things has
not been a resigned abandonment of old values but rather a mad
overdetermination, an exacerbation of these values of reference,
function, finality and causality. Maybe nature does abhor a vacuum,
for it is there that, in order to dispel the void, plethoric, hyper¬
trophic, saturated systems arise—something redundant always
establishes itself where there is nothing left.

Determinacy does not disappear in favor of indeterminacy, but
of hyperdeterminacy—the redundancy of determinacy in the void.

Finality does not give way to the aleatory, but to a hyperfi¬
nality, a hyperfunctionality: more functional than the functional,
more final than the final—hypertely.

Plunged by chance into an abnormal uncertainty, we have
responded with an excess of causality and finality. Hypertely is no
accident in the evolution of a few animal species, but a challenge
of finality to a growing indeterminacy. In a system where things are
increasingly governed by chance, finality turns into delirium, and
elements develop that know only too well how to exceed their
end—until they wind up invading the whole system.

This goes for the behavior of the cancerous cell (hypervitality
in only one direction), the hyperspecialization of objects and
subjects, the operationality of the slightest detail and the hyper-

30 / Fatal Strategies

signification of the slightest sign: the leitmotif of our daily lives,
this is also the secret canker of all obese and cancerous systems—
communication, information, production, destruction—all of
which have long passed the limits of their function, of their use-
value, and entered upon a ghostly escalation of finalities.

A hysteria the inverse of that of finalities: the hysteria of causality,
corresponding to the simultaneous erasure of origins and causes:
the obsessive search for origin, responsibility, and reference—an
attempt to exhaust phenomena back to their infinitesimal causes.
But it is also the complex of genesis and genetics that inspires, to
varying degrees, psychoanalytic palingenesis (all of the psyche
hypostasized in early childhood, all signs become symptoms),
biogenetics (all probabilities saturated by the fatal agency of
molecules), the hypertrophy of historical research, the frenzy to
explain everything, attribute everything, footnote everything. All
this becomes a fantastic encumbrance—the references all living off
each other and at each others expense. An excrescent system of
interpretation develops with no relation to its objects. All this
comes from a headlong flight forward from the hemorrhage of
objective causality.

The phenomena of inertia accelerate, frozen forms proliferate, and
growth is immobilized in excrescence. This is the form of hypertely,
which goes further than its own end: the crustacean that leaves the
sea far behind (to what secret ends?) and will never have the time to
come back. The growing gigantism of the statues of Easter Island.

Tentacular, protuberant, excrescent, hypertelic: this is the fate
of inertia in a saturated world. To deny its own end through hyper¬
finality—is this not also the process of cancer? The revenge of

Ecstasy and Inertia / 31

growth in excrescence. Revenge and denunciation of speed in
inertia. Masses are also swept up in this gigantic process of inertia
by acceleration. Mass is this excrescent process that hurls all growth
to its doom. It is a circuit shortcircuited by a monstrous finality.

Exxon: the American government asks the multinational for a
general report on all its activities throughout the world. The result
is twelve volumes of a thousand pages each, which would take years
of work to read, let alone analyze. Where is the information?

Must we put information on a diet? Must we remove the fat
from the obese, the obese systems, and create disinformation clinics?

There is an incredible overpotentiality of strategic weapons,
equaled only by the demographic excrescence of the world. As
paradoxical as it seems, both are of the same kind and correspond
to the same logic of excrescence and inertia. This is a triumphant
anomaly: no principle of law or measure can temper either one or
the other—they reciprocally imply each other. And the worst thing
is that there is no Promethean challenge involved here, no excess of
passion or pride. It simply seems that the species has crossed some
specific, mysterious point, from which it is impossible to retreat,
decelerate, or slow down.

“A painful thought: past a certain point in time, history has
not been real. Without realizing it, the whole human race
seems to have suddenly left reality behind. Everything that is
supposed to have happened since then would no longer be
true, but we wouldn’t be able realize it. Our task and our duty
would now be to uncover this point, and until we did we
would have to persist in our present destruction.”

— Canetti

32 / Fatal Strategies

Dead point*: the dead center where every system crosses this
subtle limit of reversibility, contradiction and doubt and enters
live into noncontradiction, into its own exalted contemplation,
into ecstasy....

Here begins a pataphysics of systems. This logical going
beyond, this escalation, incidentally offers some advantages as
well, even if it always assumes the form of a catastrophe in slow
motion, as is the case for destructive and strategic weapons systems.
At the point of the overcoming of destructive forces, the war scene
is over. There is no longer any useful correlation between the
potential for annihilation and its objective, so it becomes senseless
to employ it. The system dissuades itself, and this is the paradox¬
ically beneficial aspect of dissuasion: there is no more space for
war. We should therefore hope for the continuation of this nuclear
escalation and arms race as the price we pay for pure war; that is,
for the pure and empty form—the hyperreal and eternally deter¬
ring form—of war, where for the first time we can congratulate
ourselves on the absence of the event. War, just like the real, will
never again take place, unless of course the nuclear powers succeed
in their deescalation and manage to circumscribe new spaces for
war. If military power, at the price of a deescalation of this madness
so marvellously useful at one remove, once again finds a theater
for war, a restricted space—in a word, a human one—for war,
then weapons will once again find their use-value—and their
exchange-value: it will again be possible to exchange war. In its
orbital and ecstatic form war has become impossible to exchange,
and this orbitality protects us.

* Translators’ note: Words or phrases in Baudrillards text which originally appear in
English (or languages other than French) will be designated with an asterisk.

Ecstasy and Inertia / 33

What about Canetti’s wish to seize this blind point beyond which
“things have stopped being true,” where history has stopped existing
without our realizing it—without which realization we can only
persevere in our current destruction?

Even supposing we could determine this point, what would
we do? By what miracle would history become true again? By what
miracle could we go back in time to head off its disappearance?
For this point is also that of the end of linear time, and all the
marvels of science-fiction for “going back in time” are useless if
from now on time no longer exists, if behind us the past has
already totally disappeared.

What precautions should we have taken to avoid this historical
collapse, this coma, this volatization of the real? Did we commit
some error? Did the human race commit some error, violate some
secret, commit some fatal imprudence? It is as useless wondering
about that as asking yourself the mysterious reason why a woman
has left you: nothing could have been changed in any event. The
terrifying aspect of an event of this kind is that, beyond a certain
point, all efforts to exorcize it only precipitate it; no foreboding has
ever been of any use; each event makes the one which preceded it
completely right. It is the naivete of imputing every event to causes
that makes us think it could not have happened—the pure event,
without any causes, can only unfold ineluctably. On the other hand
it can never be reproduced, whereas a causal process can always be,
which is exactly why it is no longer an event.

Canetti’s wish, therefore, is a pious one, even if his hypothesis
is a radical one. The point he refers to is by definition impossible
to find, for if we could grasp it, time would be given back to us.
The point from which we could turn the process of the dispersion
of time and history around escapes us—that is really why we

34 / Fatal Strategies

have crossed it without noticing it, and of course without having
wanted to.

Furthermore, perhaps Canetti’s point does not even exist. It exists
only if you can prove that there was in fact a history before it—
which becomes impossible once you have passed the point. In a
sphere foreign to history, history itself can no longer reflect or
prove itself. This is why we call on every previous epoch, every way
of life, every mentality to historicize itself, to recount itself with
proof and documents in hand (everything becomes documentary):
it is because we feel that all this has been invalidated in our own
sphere, which is that of the end of history.

We can neither go backward nor accept this situation. Some have
cheerfully resolved the dilemma: they have discovered the anti-
Canetti point, that of a deceleration which would allow us to come
back into history, the real, and the social, like a satellite lost in
hyperspace reentering Earth’s atmosphere. A false radicality had
scattered us into centrifugal spaces; a vital leap will bring us back
to reality. Everything becomes real and takes on meaning again
once this specter of historical unreality, this sudden collapse of time
and the real, is conjured away.

Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps we should have stopped this
hemorrhage of value. Enough of this terrorist radicalism; enough
simulacra—let us have a rebirth of morality, belief and meaning.
Down with twilight analyses!

Beyond this point there are only inconsequential events (and
inconsequential theories), precisely because they absorb their sense
into themselves. They reflect nothing, presage nothing.

Ecstasy and Inertia / 35

Beyond this point there are only catastrophes. Perfect is the event
or language which assumes its own mode of disappearance, knows
how to stage it, and thus reaches the maximal energy of appearances.

The catastrophe is the maximal brute event, here too more
eventful than the event—but an event without consequences, one
that leaves the world in suspense.

Once the meaning of history is over, once this point of inertia
has been passed, every event becomes catastrophe, becomes an
event pure and without consequence (but that is its power).

The event without consequence—like Musil’s man without
qualities, the body without organs, or time without memory.

When light is captured and swallowed by its own source, there is
then a brutal involution of time into the event itself. Catastrophe
in the literal sense: the inflection or curve that has its origin and
end coincide in one, that makes the end return to the origin and
annul it, yielding to an event without precedent and without con¬
sequences—pure event.

This is also the catastrophe of sense: the event without conse¬
quence is signaled by the fact that all causes can be imputed to it
indifferently without its being possible to choose among them. Its
origin is unintelligible, its destination equally so. You cannot go
back against the course of time nor the course of meaning.

Every event is today virtually inconsequential, open to all possible
interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning: the
equiprobability of all causes and of all consequences—multiple and
aleatory imputation.

If the waves of meaning, if the waves of memory and historical
time are receding, if the waves of causality around the effect are

36 / Fatal Strategies

behind this acceleration something is beginning to slow down
absolutely. Are we now slowing down absolutely?

What if light slowed, dropping to “human” speeds? What if it
bathed us in a slow-motion flux of images, until it was slower than
our own movement?

We would then need to generalize from the case of light reaching
us from stars that have long ceased to exist—their image is still
crossing light-years to get to us. If light was infinitely slower, a lot of
things, even the closest ones, would have already suffered the fate of
those stars: we would see them, and they’d be here, but they would
no longer be there. Wouldn’t this be the case for the real itself: some¬
thing whose image is still coming at us, but which no longer exists?
We can make the analogy with mental objects and the mental ether.

Or supposing light were very slow, could bodies approach us
faster than their image—then what would happen? They would rub
into us without our seeing them coming. We could further imagine,
unlike our universe, where slow bodies all move at speeds much
lower than that of light, a universe where bodies move at prodigious
speeds, except light itself, which would be very slow. Total chaos, no
longer regulated by the instantaneity of luminous messages.

Light like the wind, with variable speeds, even dead calms,
where no image could get to us from the zones affected.

Light like perfume: differing according to the body, scarcely
diffusing outside of an immediate environment. A sphere of lumi¬
nous messages attentuating as they go. The images of the body
scarcely propagate beyond a certain luminous territory: beyond
that, it no longer exists.

Or also, light moving with the slowness of continents, conti¬
nental plates, one slipping over the other, and thus provoking
shocks that would distort all our images and visions of space.

38 / Fatal Strategies

Can one imagine a slow refraction of faces and gestures, like
the movements of swimmers in heavy water? How do you look
someone in the eyes, how do you seduce him if you are not sure he
is still there? What if a cinematic slow-motion took control of the
whole universe? A comical exaltation of the accelerated, which
transcends sense by explosion but also the poetic enchantment of
slow-motion, which destroys sense by implosion.

Suspense and slow-motion are our current tragic forms, since
acceleration has become our banal condition. Time is no longer
evident in its normal passing, since it has been distended, enlarged
to the floating dimension of reality. It is no longer illuminated by
will. Nor is space illuminated any longer by movement. Since their
destination has been lost, some kind of predestination would have
to intervene again to give them back a tragic effect. We can read
this predestination in suspense and slow-motion, that which so
suspends the development of the form that the meaning no longer
crystallizes. Or else beneath the discourse of meaning another flows
slowly and implodes under it.

So slow that it could curl up on itself and even stop totally in its
progression, light could lead to a total suspension of the universe.

This kind of play of systems around a point of inertia is illustrated by
the catastrophic form congenital to the era of simulation: the seismic
form, where the ground is missing, that of fault and failure,
dehiscence and fractal objects, where immense plates, entire layers
slide one under the other and produce intense surface tremors. No
longer is it the devouring fires of heaven that smite us: that generating
thunderbolt that was still a punishment and a purification and which
fructified the earth. It is not the deluge: that is rather a maternal
catastrophe, which is at the origin of the world. These are the great

Ecstasy and Inertia / 39

legendary and mythical forms that haunt us. More recently we have
the explosion, which culminated in the obsession with nuclear cata¬
strophe (but, inversely, it fed the myth of the Big Bang, of the
explosion as origin of the universe). Even more current is the seismic
form, so true is it that catastrophes take on the form of their culture.
Cities are even distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presup¬
pose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is
King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: “Towering
Inferno.”* Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off
and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.* This is a form that today is
more proximal and evocative: on the order of fission and instantaneous
propagation, undulatory, spasmodic and brutal commutation. The sky
no longer falls on you from on high; instead whole territories slide
away. We are in a fissile universe, of wandering ice-floes and horizon¬
tal drifts. Interstitial collapse—that is the seismic effect (mental, too),
that waits in ambush for us. The dehiscence of the things most firmly
attached, the trembling of things tightening and contracting over their
emptiness. For at bottom (!) the ground never existed, only a cracked
epidermis; nor were there any depths, which we now know are in
fusion. Seisms tell us as much; they are a requiem for the infrastruc¬
ture. We are no longer waiting for the stars or the heavens, but for the
subterranean gods who threaten us with a collapse into emptiness.

We dream of capturing that energy, too. But that is pure mad¬
ness. We might as well hope to capture the energy of automobile
accidents, of dogs that have been run over, or of anything that col¬
lapses. (New hypothesis: if things have a greater tendency to
disappear and collapse, perhaps the principal source of future energy
will be accident and catastrophe). One thing is certain: even if we
don’t succeed in capturing seismic energy, the symbolic wave of the
earthquake is not about to subside: the symbolic energy, so to

40 / Fatal Strategies

speak, the fascinating and derisory power that such an event
affords, is incomparable to the material destruction.

It is that power, that symbolic energy of rupture, that they are
really trying to capture in that mad project, or in that other, more
immediate one, of heading off seisms through scenarios of evacua¬
tion. The funny part is that experts have calculated that the state of
emergency decreed by an earthquake warning would unleash such
a panic that its effects would be greater than the earthquake itself.
Here we fall into full derision: lacking a real catastrophe, it will be
easy to unleash a simulated one, one which will be as good as the
first and can even replace it. You wonder if that is not what
“experts” fantasize about—and it is exactly the same case in the
nuclear domain: don’t all the preventive and dissuasive systems act
like virtual foci of catastrophe? On the pretense of prevention, they
materialize all the consequences in the immediate future. How true
it is that we cannot rely on chance to bring on catastrophe: we have
to find its programmed equivalent in the preventive measures.

It is thus evident that a State or a power sophisticated enough
to predict earthquakes and prevent the consequences would con¬
stitute a danger to the community and the species much more
fantastic than the earthquakes themselves. The terremotati* of
Southern Italy have violently attacked the Italian State for its negli¬
gence (the media arrived before the emergency rescue teams, an
obvious sign of the current hierarchy of priorities). They correctly
blamed the catastrophe on the political order (inasmuch as it
claims universal solicitude for the population); but never would
they dream of an order capable of such a dissuasion of catastrophe:
the price would be such that people would at bottom prefer cata¬
strophe—with all its misery it at least fulfils the prophetic demand
for a violent end. It at least answers a profound need for derision

Ecstasy and Inertia / 41

of the political order. The same is true of terrorism: what kind of
State would be capable of dissuading and annihilating all terrorism
in the bud (Germany)? It would have to arm itself with such ter¬
rorism and generalize terror on every level. If this is the price of
security, is everybody deep down dreaming of this?

Pompei. Everything is metaphysical in this city, including its
dreamy geometry, which is not a spatial but mental geometry,
labyrinthine—time seems more harrowingly frozen here than even
in the noonday heat.

The tactile presence of these ruins is magnificent for the psyche,
with their suspense, their twisting shadows, their sheer matter-of-
factness. A conjunction of the banality of a promenade and the
immanence of another time, another moment, unique, that of
catastrophe. It is surely the murderous but abolished presence of
Vesuvius which lends the dead streets the charm of hallucination—
the illusion of being here and now, at the moment before the
eruption, and the same reinstated two thousand years later, by a
miracle of nostalgia, in the immanence of a former life.

Few places leave such an impression of worrisome uncanniness
(it is no surprise that Jansen and Freud set the psychic action of
Gradiva there). Here one feels all the heat of death, rendered all the
more vivid by the fossilized and fugitive signs of daily life: wheel-
ruts in the stone, worn curbs, the petrified wood of a half-open
door, the fold of a toga on a body buried beneath the ashes. No his¬
tory stands between these things and us, like the kind that gives
monuments their prestige: they materialize for us here, right now,
in the very heat where death caught them.

Neither monumentality nor beauty are essential to Pompei,
only the fatal intimacy of things, the fascination of their instanta-
neity as well as that of the perfect simulacrum of our own death.

42 / Fatal Strategies

Pompei is thus a kind of trompe-Voeil or primal scene: the same
vertigo of a missing dimension, that of time, the same hallucination
of an added dimension, that of the transparency of the slightest
details, like that precise vision of submerged trees living at the
bottom of an artificial lake over which you pass while swimming.

This is the mental effect of catastrophe: stopping things before
they end, thus maintaining them indefinitely in the suspense of
their apparition.

Pompei once again destroyed by earthquake. What kind of
catastrophe is this descending on these ruins? What kind of ruin is
it that needs to be once again dismantled and buried? The sadistic
irony of catastrophe, secretly waiting for things, even ruins, to
regain their beauty and meaning in order to destroy them all over
again. Catastrophe jealously makes sure to destroy the illusion of
eternity, but it plays with it too, fixing things into a second eternity.
This fixed-medusified blasting of a swarming presence of life in a
catastrophic instantaneity is what makes for the charm of Pompei.
The first catastrophe—Vesuvius—was a success. The recent seism
is much more problematic. It seems to follow the rule of the dupli¬
cation of events, to parodic effect. A petty rehearsal or repetition of
the great premiere. The end of a great destiny with a push from a
miserable divinity. But there is perhaps another meaning here,
come to warn us that we are no longer in the age of grandiose col¬
lapses and resurrections, of games of death and eternity, but of little
fractal events, smooth annihilations and gradual slides, with no
tomorrow from here on, since it is the traces themselves that are
erased by this new destiny. This leads us into the horizontal era of
events without consequences, the last act being directed by nature
herself in a glare of parody.

Ecstasy and Inertia / 43

Figures of the Transpolitical

THE TRANSPOLITICAL IS THE TRANSPARENCY and obscenity of all
structures in a destructured universe, the transparency and
obscenity of change in a dehistoricized universe, the transparency
and obscenity of information in a universe emptied of event, the
transparency and obscenity of space in the promiscuity of net¬
works, transparency and obscenity of the social in the masses, of
the political in terror, of the body in obesity and genetic
cloning.... The end of the scene of the historical, the end of the
scene of the political, the end of the scene of fantasy, the end of
the scene of the body—the irruption of the obscene. The end of
the secret—the irruption of transparency.

The transpolitical is the mode of disappearance of all of that (it
is no longer the mode of production but the mode of disappearance
that excites us); it is the malicious curvature that puts an end to the
horizon of meaning. The saturation of systems brings them to their
point of inertia: the equilibrium of terror and deterrence, the orbital
round of floating capital, H-bombs, information satellites—and of
theories, themselves floating, satellites of an abstract referential.
Obesity of memory systems, of information stocks that are henceforth
no longer treatable—obesity, the saturation of a system of nuclear
destruction now exceeding its own ends, excrescent, hypertelic.

The transpolitical is also this: the passage from growth to
excrescence, from finality to hypertely, from organic equilibria to
cancerous metastases. This is the site of a catastrophe and no longer
of a crisis. Things rush into it at the rhythm of a technology,
including soft and psychedelic technologies, which drag us ever
further away from any reality, any history, any destiny.

But if the secret is being increasingly harried by transparency, if
the scene (not only that of meaning, but also the power of illusion
and the seduction of appearances) is being increasingly harried by
the obscene, we may take consolation in the fact that the enigma
remains whole—including that of the transpolitical.

The era of the political was one of anomie . crisis, violence,
madness, and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of
anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with
the event of no consequence.

Anomie is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the law;
anomaly is that which escapes the jurisdiction of the norm. (Law is
an institution, but the norm is a curve; law is a transcendence, but
the norm is a mean.) Anomaly is at play in an aleatory, statistical
field, a field of variations and modulations which no longer knows
the margin or transgression characteristic of the law, since all of
that is reduced to a statistical and operational equation, a field so
normalized that abnormality no longer has a place in it, even as a
kind of madness or subversion. Yet there still remains anomaly.

There is something mysterious about this; we don’t know
exactly where it comes from. As for anomie , we at least knew what
it is about: law is allegedly known, and anomie not an aberration,
but an infraction of a specific system. For anomaly, there is doubt
about the very law it escapes, the rule it breaks. This law no longer
exists or is not known. There is infraction, or rather waywardness,

46 / Fatal Strategies

with respect to a state of things we no longer know to be a system
of cause and effect.

Anomaly no longer has the tragic side of abnormality, nor even
the dangerous and deviant side of anomie. It is somehow harmless,
harmless and inexplicable. It is on the order of a pure and simple
apparition, the rising to the surface of a system (ours) something
come from elsewhere. From another system?

Anomaly has no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is
rather that of a mutant.

The Obese

I would like to talk about an anomaly—that fascinating obesity, such
as you find all over the U.S., that kind of monstrous conformity to
empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the
hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where
the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.

This strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat
nor the neurotic one of depression. It is neither the compensatory
obesity of the underdeveloped nor the alimentary one of the
overnourished. Paradoxically, it is a mode of disappearance for
the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has
disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by which the body
watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unre¬
strained redundancy of a living organism. No more limits, no more
transcendence: it is as if the body was no longer opposed to an
external world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.

These obese people are fascinating for their total oblivion of
seduction. Furthermore, they no longer worry about it; they have

Figures of the Transpolitical / 47

no complexes about how they live, insouciant, as if there was not
even an ego ideal left for them. They are not ridiculous and they
know it. They claim a sort of truth, and in fact they do display
something of the system, of its empty inflation. They are its nihilist
expression, that of the general incoherence of signs, morphologies,
forms of alimentation and of the city—hypertrophied cellular
tissue, proliferating in all directions.

A fetal obesity, primal and placental: as if they were pregnant
with their own bodies but could not be delivered of them. The body
grows and grows without being able to deliver itself. But also a
secondary obesity, the obesity of simulation in the image of present
systems, bloated with information they can never deliver, the obesity
characteristic of operational modernity, in its frenzy to store and
memorize everything, to pass, in the most total uselessness, to the
very limits of the inventory of the world and of information, and in
the process to set up a monstrous potentiality for which there is no
representation possible, which can no longer even be put into play,
a vain redundancy that, a century after larry, but in a cool universe
without irony, and without pataphysical acid, evokes Pere Ubus
famous paunch.

Pataphysics or metaphysics, this pregnancy hysteria is one of
the strangest signs of American culture, of this spectral environment
where each cell (each function, each structure), is left with the
possibility, as in cancer, of ramifying, of multiplying indefinitely,
of occupying virtually all the space by itself, of monopolizing all
the information unto itself (feedback is already an obese structure,
the matrix of all structural obesities), of settling down into a con¬
tented genetic redundancy. Each molecule happy in the paradise
of its own formula....

48 / Fatal Strategies

It is therefore not the obesity of a few individuals that is at stake, but
that of a whole system, the obscenity of a whole culture. It is when
the body loses its rule and its stage or scene that it reaches this
obscene form of obesity. It is when the social body loses its law, its
scene and its stakes that it also reaches the pure and obscene form
we know it to be, its visible and too visible form, its ostentation, the
investment and overinvestment of all spaces by the social—the spec¬
tral and transparent character of the whole remaining unchanged.

This obesity too is spectral—in no way heavy, it floats in the
good conscience of sociality. It incarnates the formless form, the
amorphous morphology of the currently social: the ideal individual
paradigm of reconciliation, of the closed and self-managed niche.
These are no longer bodies, strictly speaking, but specimens of a cer¬
tain cancerous inorganicity that now lie in wait for us everywhere.

To remain in the oral dimension (although there is nothing
compulsive or orally repressive about this obesity), you could say
that the social is just like the sense of taste in Amencan cuisine. It
is a gigantic enterprise of dissuasion from the taste of food: its
savor is, as it were, isolated, expurgated and resynthesized in the
form of burlesque and artificial sources. This is flavor*, just as
once there was cinematic glamor*: erasing all personal character in
favor of an aura of the studio and the fascination of models. Like¬
wise for the social: just as the function of taste is isolated in the
sauce, the social is isolated as a function in all the therapeutic
sauces in which we float. A sociosphere of contact, control, per¬
suasion and dissuasion, of exhibition of inhibitions in massive or
homeopathic doses (“Have a problem? We solve it!”*): this is
obscenity. Ail structures turned inside out and exhibited, all oper¬
ations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the
bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires (the

Figures of the Transpolitical / 49

whole system is on the surface) to the concrete multiplication of
all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on
the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or I.Q., and
includes harassment by signals, the obsession with displaying the
innards of power, the equivalent of the mad desire to locate the
critical function in the lobes of the brain....

Living determination is lost in desperate programming, and
everything reinvents itself as overdetermination and looks for its
hysterical hypostasis. Likewise, the social, once the mirror of con¬
flict, class, and the proletariat, finds its definitive hypostasis among
the handicapped. Historical contradictions have taken the pata-
physical form of mental or physical deficiency. There is something
strange about this conversion hysteria of the social—the most
probable diagnosis is that, for the handicapped as well as for the
feeble-minded or the obese, the social is haunted by its disap¬
pearance. Having lost its credibility and the rules of its political
game, the social looks in what it sees as its own its living waste for
a son of transpolitical legitimacy—after the management of the
crisis, overt self-management of the deficit and monstrosity . 1

It used to be, “To each according to his deserts,” then, “to each
according to his needs,” and later, “to each according to his desire.”
Today it is: “to each according to his lack.”

1. But “deficit” management of the social results, as we know, in all sorts of
impasses, of which the following is an allegory: all over the US, they have adapted
the sidewalks to afford access to motorized handicapped persons. But the blind who
used to be guided by the curbs are disoriented, and are often run over. So they came
up with the idea of a handrail for the blind along the street, but then the handicapped
get caught on these rails in their wheelchairs ....

50 / Fatal Strategies

The obese somehow escape sexuality and sexual division by the indi¬
visibility of the full body. They resolve the void of sex by absorption
of the surrounding space. They are pregnant, symbolically speaking,
with all the objects from which they have been unable to separate,
or those from which they have not found enough distance to love.
They do not separate the body from the non-body. Their bodies are
convex or concave mirrors; they have not succeeded in producing
the flat mirror that could reflect them.

This break—the mirror stage, which allows the child, by distin¬
guishing limits, to open himself to the scene of imagination and
representation—doesn’t occur with the obese, and lacking access to
this internal division, they enter into the undivided multiplication
of bodies without images.

There are no obese animals, just as there is no obscene animal.
Could it be that the animal is never confronted with the scene,
nor with its own image? Not being subjected to this scenic obliga¬
tion, it could not be obscene. For man, on the other hand, this
obligation is absolute, but for the obese there is a kind of release
from this obligation, from all pride of representation, from any
seductive impulse—the loss of the body as face. The pathology
of the obese is not endocrine, but a pathology of the scene and
the obscene.

It is difficult to say what constitutes the scene of the body. We
can at least say this: it is where the body is in play, and particularly
where it plays itself, where it escapes into the ellipsis of forms and
movements, into dance, where it escapes its inertia, into gesture,
where it is unbound itself, into the aura of looking, where it makes
itself into allusion and absence—in short, where it offers itself as
seduction. It is the absence of all this which transforms the obese
into an obscene mass.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 51

Suddenly the obese, in its redundancy, makes sex appear like
too much, superfluous. It has this in common with the clone—
another mutant which has never yet appeared, but which the
obscene prefigures rather well. Does not the obese person cherish
the dream of hypertrophying in order one day to divide into two
like beings? Transsexual in his own way, does he not aim at going
beyond sexual reproduction, at going back once again to scissi-
parous single-celled being? The proliferation of the body is not far
from genetic proliferation.

The paradox of cloning is precisely that of producing beings
identical to their genetic parent (non-Oedipal!), and therefore sexual,
even though sexuality has become perfectly useless in the matter.
The sex of the clone is superfluous. This is not Georges Bataille’s
excessive superfluity—it is simply a useless residue, like certain
animal organs or appendages, whose finality we can no longer con¬
ceive and which seem anomalous and monstrous. Sex has become
an excrescence, an eccentric difference that no longer produces
meaning as such (such dead differences are scattered in heaps
throughout our history and that of the species).

Perhaps there exists in all organic unity a drive to develop by
pure contiguity, a tendency to linear and cellular monotony? This
is what Freud called the death drive, which is only the undifferen¬
tiated excrescence of the living. This process knows neither crisis
nor catastrophe: it is hypertelic, in the sense that it has no other end
than limitless increase, without any consideration of limits.

At a given moment something happens to stop this process. In
obesity the process doesn’t stop. The body, losing its specific traits,
pursues the monotonous expansion of its tissues. Not longer even
individualized or sexual, it is no more than an indefinite extension:
metastasis.

52 / Fatal Strategies

Franz von Baader calls metastasis, which he likens to ecstasy—in his
essay, '‘Uber den Begriff der Ekstasis als Metastasis” (“On the Con¬
cept of Ecstasy as Metastasis”)—the anticipation of death, and of
the beyond of its own end at the heart of life itself. And certainly
there is some of this for the obese, whom we may think of as hav¬
ing swallowed their own dead bodies while still alive—which makes
for too much body and suddenly makes the body seem like too
much. This is the engorgement of a useless organ. He has somehow
swallowed his own sex, and it is this swallowing of the sex that
makes for the obscenity of this hypertrophied body.

Baaders ecstatic or metastatic form, that of the death which
comes to haunt the living and makes them appear like useless incar¬
nations, can be readily generalized to present-day information
systems. These too are metastatic in their anticipation of dead
meaning in living signification, thereby producing too much
meaning, a production of superfluous meaning, like a useless
prosthesis. The same is true of porn; its ghostly ambiance comes to
it from its anticipation of dead sex in living sexuality, from the
weight of all the dead sex (as one used to speak of the weight of dead
labor on living labor). In so doing, porn makes sexuality appear
superfluous—that is what is obscene: not that there is too much sex,
but that sex is too much. What makes the obese obscene is not that
there is too much body, but that the body is superfluous, de trop.

What is the secret end in all of this (for there must be one)?
What lewd demon would hold this deforming mirror up to the
body (for there is lewdness in it)?

Perhaps it is a matter of revolt, as in cancer? Once, revolts were
political; there were groups or individuals oppressed in their desire,
their energy or their intelligence. Today these hardly ever break out.
In our quartenary universe, revolt has become genetic, like the cells in

Figures of the Transpolitical / 53

cancer and metastases: uncontrollable vitality and undisciplined pro¬
liferation. This is a revolt too, a nondialectical, subliminal one which
escapes us. But who knows the destiny of cancerous formations?
Perhaps their hypertely corresponds to the hyperreality of our social
formations. It is as if the body, its cells, were rebelling against their
genetic decree, against the commandments (as they’ve rightly been
termed) of DNA. The body rebels against its own “objective” defini¬
tion. Is it a pathological act (as occurs elsewhere in the deregulation
of antibodies)? In traditional pathology, somatic or psychosomatic,
the body reacts to external aggressions—physical, social, psychologi¬
cal: exoteric reaction. With cancer it’s a matter of an esoteric reaction:
the body rebels against its own internal organization, undoes its own
structural equilibrium. It’s as if the species had had enough of its own
definition and had thrown itself into an organic delirium. 2

2. We can observe that the pathology related to the metaphorical body, with its divi¬
sion and repression, no longer operates in this metastatic phase. The body, that of the
obese, the clone, the cancer, is a prosthesis, a metastasis, an ex-crescence—it is no
longer a scene, and fantasy and repression no longer hold for it. In some sense it no
longer has an unconscious, and this is the end of psychoanalysis. But this is doubt¬
less also the beginning of another pathology: we know this clonic (chronic)
melancholy of infinitely divisible beings, of single-celled, nonsexual protozoans that
proceed by extension and expulsion and no longer by drive and intensity, that proceed
not by growth but by excrescence, not by seduction but by transduction (that of bod¬
ies that have become networks and which thread their way through a network). We
know this melancholy of being and of narcissistic society—narcissistic by indivisibil¬
ity and indefiniteness—for which analysis can no longer do anything. In any event,
this kind of analysis, psychoanalysis, can only say something in the field of metaphor,
which is that of a symbolic order. It has nothing to say in a different order—neither
in that of metamorphosis nor, at the other extreme, in that of metastasis.

54 / Fatal Strategies

The obese is also in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of
a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. Fie no
longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess,
his redundancy, his hypeneality.

He exceeds his own pathology. This is why he escapes both
dietetics and psychotherapy, and goes back to that other logic, that
exponential strategy where things deprived of their finality or of
their reference redouble each other in a kind of hall of mirrors.

Obesity would thus be a good example of the turn of events
lying in wait for all of us, this revolution in things which lies no
longer in their dialectical transcendence ( Aufhebung ,) but rather in
their potentialization ( Steigerung ,), in their elevation to the second
power, to the « th power—in that ascension to extremes related to the
absence of rules for the game.

Like speed—which is the sole perfect expression of mobility,
because it is unlike movement (which has meaning or direction)—
obesity no longer has any meaning or direction either; it goes
nowhere and no longer has anything to do with movement: it is the
ecstasy of movement. Thus there is something about the body, of
which, in its aberration, obesity may be the perfect confirmation
and ecstatic truth, because in it the body, instead of being reflected,
captures itself in its own magnifying mirror. “Only tautological
sentences are perfectly true,” says Canetti.

The Hostage

Violence is anomic, but terror is anomalous. Like obesity, terror is a
sort of convex and deforming mirror of order and the political
scene: the mirror of its disappearance. It too seems to come from

Figures of the Transpolitical / 55

some other set of connections, aleatory and vertiginous, from a
panic by contiguity, and no longer seems to respond to the deter¬
minations of mere violence. More violent than the violent—such is
terrorism, whose transpolitical spiral corresponds to the same ascen¬
sion to the limits in the absence of any rules for the game.

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalcu¬
lable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own
death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him some¬
thing absolutely arbitrary. There are no longer even any rules for the
game of his life or death. This is why he is beyond alienation,
beyond the terms of alienation and exchange. He is in a state of
radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

He may no longer even run the risk of his own life: it too is
stolen from him to serve as a cover. That is somehow the worst part
of it—the hostage himself no longer risks anything: he is perfectly
covered, and is removed from his own fate.

He is no longer a victim at all, since he is not the one who
dies—he merely answers for the death of another. His sovereignty is
not even alienated; it is congealed.

This is how it is in war, according to a law of equivalence that
is precisely not one of war: ten hostages shot for every assassinated
officer. But whole peoples can serve as hostages to their leaders:
the German people were destined for death by Hitler if he was not
victorious. And in nuclear strategy, civilian populations and great
urban centers are used as hostages by military high commands:
their death and destruction serve as a dissuasive argument.

We are all hostages. We all now serve as dissuasive arguments.
Objective hostages: we answer collectively for something, but for
what? This is a kind of fate that is fixed, and whose manipulators we
can no longer even see. But we know the scales on which our death

56 / Fatal Strategies

is decided are no longer in our own hands, and we now live in a state
of permanent suspense and emergency whose symbol is the nuclear
bomb. Objective hostages of a savage god, we don’t even know what
event, what accident will touch off the ultimate manipulation.

But we are also subjective hostages. We answer for ourselves; we
serve as a cover for ourselves, we answer for our risks with our own
heads. This is the law of the insured society, where all risks must be
covered. This situation corresponds to that of the hostage. We are
hospitalized by society, taken hostage.* Neither life nor death: this
is security—this, paradoxically, is also the status of the hostage.

This is an extreme and caricatured form of responsibility: an
anonymous, statistical, formal and aleatory one that plays on the
terrorist act or the taking of hostages. But if you think about it,
terrorism is only the executioner for a system which itself also seeks
both total anonymity and, at the same time and contradictorily,
total responsibility for each of us. With the death of anyone, it
executes the sentence of anonymity that is henceforth ours, that of
the anonymous system, anonymous power, the anonymous terror of
our real lives. The principle behind extermination is not death, but
rather statistical indifference.

Terrorism is only the operator of a concept that denies itself in
its very realization, that of unlimited, indeterminate responsibility
(anyone is responsible for anything at any given moment). It only
carries to its extreme consequences the essential proposition of
liberal and Christian humanism: all men are in solidarity; you, here,
are in solidarity with and responsible for the wretched poverty of the
pariah of Calcutta. While asking ourselves about the monstrosity of
terrorism, we should perhaps ask ourselves if it does not really derive
from a proposition of universal responsibility itself monstrous and
terrorist in its essence.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 57

Our paradoxical situation is this: because nothing any longer has
meaning, everything should work perfectly. Because there is no
longer a responsible subject, each event, even a minimal one,
must be desperately imputed to someone or something—every¬
one is responsible, some maximal floating responsibility is there,
waiting to be invested in any kind of incident. Every anomaly
must be justified and every irregularity must find its guilty party,
its criminal link. This too is terror and terrorism: this hunt for
responsibility without any common measure with the event—this
hysteria of responsibility that is itself a consequence of the disap¬
pearance of causes and the almighty power of effects.

The problem of security, as we know, haunts our societies and
long ago replaced the problem of liberty. This is not as much a
moral or philosophical change as an evolution in the objective
state of systems:

— a relatively loose, diffuse and extensive state of the system
produces liberty;

— a different state of the system (denser) produces security
(self-regulation, control, feedback, etc.);

— a further state of the system, that of proliferation and satu¬
ration, produces panic and terror.

There is no metaphysics in any of this: these are objective states
of the system. You can apply it just as well to the circulation of
traffic or to the system of circulation of responsibility—it amounts
to the same thing. Liberty, security, terror: we have successively
passed through these stages in every domain. First personal
responsibility, then control (the assumption of responsibility by an

58 / Fatal Strategies

objective entity), then terror (generalized responsibility and black¬
mail for responsibility).

It is for the purpose of making amends and putting a stop to the
scandal of accidental death (unacceptable for our system of liberty,
law and profitability) that the great systems of terror have been set
up, that is, programs for the prevention of accidental death by
systematic and organized death. That is our monstrously logical
situation: the death systems put an end to death as a accident. And
it is that logic that terrorism tries desperately to disrupt by replacing
systematic death (institutionalized terror) with elective logic: that
of the hostage.

The Pope, by offering himself as a substitute victim for the
hostages in Mogadishu, seeks to replace anonymous terror with an
elective death, a sacrifice, similar to the Christ-like model of uni¬
versal redemption. But this offer is a parody without intending to
be, for it puts forth a solution and model that are altogether incon¬
ceivable in our present systems, whose province is not sacrifice but
extermination, not the elected victim but spectacular anonymity.
Even the “sacrifice” of terrorists, trying to resolve the situation by
their own death, has nothing expiatory about it; it raises for only an
instant the veil of anonymous terror.

There is nothing to redeem. Both terrorists and hostages have lost
their names: they all have become unnamable.

They no longer have any territory, either. We speak of “terrorist
space”: airports, embassies, fractile zones, nonterritorial zones. The
embassy is the infinitesimal space in which a whole country can be
taken hostage. The plane, with its passengers, is a parcel of land, a
wandering molecule of enemy territory, and therefore almost no
longer a territory, therefore almost a hostage already, since to take

Figures of the Transpolitical / 59

something hostage is to tear it from its territory and revert it to the
equilibrium of terror. Today this terror is our normal, silent condi¬
tion everywhere, but it materializes more visibly in orbital space, the
sidereal space that everywhere now hovers over our own.

It is from this no man’s land of terror that the world is now
managed; it is from this in some sense extraterritorial, extraplane¬
tary space that the world is literally taken hostage. That is what the
equilibrium of terror means: the world is held collectively responsi¬
ble for the order that reigns there—if anything were to come
dangerously close to infringing this order, the world would have to
be destroyed. And from where could it be done more efficiently
than from those places outside the world, from satellites and bombs
in orbit? From there, definitively no longer a territory, all territories
are ideally neutralized and held hostage. We have become the satel¬
lites of our satellites.

The space of terrorism is no different than the orbital space of
control. By satellites and flights into space, civilian as well as mili¬
tary, planetary space is mise en abyme, suspended in an uncertain
imminence, just like the hostage in the space of his detention: ‘ex-
stasized,’ literally, then exterminated. 3

Just as there is a space of terrorism, there is a circulation of
hostages. Every hostage-taking, every terrorist act is an answer to
another act, and one gets the impression, on a global level, of a
chain, a linking of transpolitical terrorist acts (while the political
scene doesn’t give this impression of a chain reaction at all) like an

3. The abstraction of orbital control should not hide the fact that this equilibrium of
terror is present on the infinitesimal and individual level: we are held responsible for
the order that rules in us. If this order came to be seriously threatened, we are psy¬
chologically programmed to destroy ourselves....

60 / Fatal Strategies

uninterrupted circuit, also orbital, conveying a sort of sacrificial
information from one point to another on the planet a little like the
kula circulated throughout the Melanesian archipelago.

Nothing is more like this putting hostages into circulation, this
absolute form of human convertibility, a sort of pure and impossi¬
ble form of exchange, than the form of Euro-petro dollars and other
floating currencies, deterritorialized to such an extent, and beyond
gold and national currencies, that they are virtually no longer
exchanged, but follow their orbital cycle among themselves, incar¬
nating an abstract delirium of transcendence and control. And it is
also the pure and impossible form of war that is incarnated in
orbital bombs.

We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has
replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and
the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. Gone is the con¬
stellation of the slave and the proletarian: from now on it is the
hostage and the terrorist. Gone is the constellation of alienation:
from now on it is that of terror. It is worse than the one it replaces,
but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of
history. It is the era of the transpolitical that is beginning.

We have entered the constellation of blackmail not only in the
“political” sphere, but everywhere. Everywhere the insane multipli¬
cation of responsibility operates as dissuasion.

Even including our own identity, whose hostages we are: called
upon to assume it, to answer for it with our own lives (this is called
security, occasionally social), called on to be ourselves, to talk,
delight, realize ourselves—under pain of... Under pain of what? A
provocation. Provocation—unlike seduction, which allows things to
come into play and appear in secret, dual and ambiguous—does not
leave you free to be; it calls on you to reveal yourself as you are. It is

Figures of the Transpolitical / 61

always blackmail by identity (and thus a symbolic murder, since you
are never that, except precisely by being condemned to it).

The entire sphere of manipulation is of the same order. Manip¬
ulation is a soft technology of violence by blackmail. And blackmail
always functions by taking hostage a parcel of the other, a secret, an
affect, a desire, a pleasure, his suffering, his death; this is what we
play on in manipulation (and this covers the whole field of psy¬
chology). It is our way of arousing, by forced solicitation, a demand
equivalent to our own.

In the interindividual regime of demand (as opposed to love,
passion, or seduction), we are submitted to affective blackmail,
and we are the affective hostage of the other: “If you don’t give me
that, you will be responsible for my depression—if you don’t love
me, you will be responsible for my death,” and of course, “if you
don’t allow yourself to be loved, you will be responsible for your
own death.” In short, a hysterical envelopment—a summons and
solicitation to respond.

In order not to be taken, take others hostage. Don’t hesitate.
It’s the common rule anyway, and it’s the general condition. The
only transpolitical condition is that of masses. The only transpo¬
litical act is terrorism, the one which reveals our transpolitical
wretchedness and draws its own extreme conclusions. And this,
unfortunately for our critical spirits, is true on either side. In the
taking of a hostage there is no message; it has no meaning or
political efficacy. It is an event without consequences (and always
leads to a dead end). But do political events themselves ever offer
anything but a false continuity? It is the solution of continuity
that is interesting. Once it seemed to present itself as revolution;
today it ends up as special effects. And terrorism itself is only a
gigantic special effect.

62 / Fatal Strategies

However, this is not because no meaning is intended. Against
the general transparence, terrorism wishes to call on things to
regain their meaning again, but does no more than accelerate this
sentence of death and indifference. Its effect is nevertheless of a
type special enough to be distinguished and opposed to others as
the catastrophic form of transparence, the crystalline form, the
intensive form—unlike all the extensive forms that surround us. It
reflects the dilemma we are unfortunately locked into—that there
is doubtless no solution to the latent extension of terror save in its
visible intensification.

The only revolution in things is today no longer in their dialec¬
tical transcendence (Aufhebung), but in their potentialization, in
their elevation to the second power, in their elevation to the n‘ h
power, whether that of terrorism, irony, or simulation. It is no
longer dialectics, but ecstasy that is in process.

Thus terrorism is the ecstatic form of violence; thus the state is
the ecstatic form of society; thus porn is the ecstatic form of sex, the
obscene the ecstatic form of the scene, etc. It seems that things,
having lost their critical and dialectical determination, can only
redouble themselves in their exacerbated and transparent form, as in
Virilio’s “pure war”: the ecstasy of unreal war, contingent and present
everywhere. Spatial exploration likewise is a mise en abyme of this
world. Everywhere the virus of potentialization and mise en
abyme carries the day, carries us towards an ecstasy which is also
that of indifference.

Terrorism—hostage-taking—would be a political act if it were
solely an act of the desperate oppressed. (Perhaps it still is in certain
cases.) But it has in fact become normal and generalized behavior on
the part of all nations and all groups. So the Soviet Union doesn’t
liquidate Sakharov, nor does it annex Afghanistan: it takes Sakharov

Figures of the Transpolitical / 63

hostage; it takes Afghanistan hostage: “if you upset the balance of
power, then I will stiffen into cold war....” The Olympic Games
serve as America’s hostage against the Soviet Union: “if you don’t
back off, the Games are off....” Oil serves as a hostage for the pro¬
ducing countries against the West. There is no point in deploring
this situation in the name of human rights or anything else. We are
already far beyond that, and hostage-takers do nothing but openly
translate the truth of the system of dissuasion (which we counter
with the system of morality).

More commonly, we are all in this way hostages of the social: “if
you don’t participate—if you don’t manage your capital, money,
health, desire—if you’re not social, you destroy yourself.” This
baroque idea of taking oneself hostage in order to have one’s
demands met is not so singular—this is the act committed by “mad¬
men” who hole up and resist to the death.

Blackmail is worse than interdiction. Dissuasion is worse
than sanctions. In dissuasion it is no longer, “Don’t do that,” but
rather, “if you don’t do it...” And it stops there—the threatening
eventuality is left in suspense. The whole art of blackmail and
manipulation lies in this suspense—the “suspense” peculiar to
terror (just as in hostage-taking the hostage is suspended, not
condemned: suspended over an outcome that escapes him).
Needless to say, we all live collectively under nuclear blackmail—
not under the direct threat, but under the blackmail of the
nuclear, which is strictly speaking not a system of destruction,
but of planetary manipulation.

This institutes a wholly different type of relation to power
than that based on the violence of interdiction. The latter had a
specific referent and object, and therefore transgression of it was
a possibility. Blackmail, however, is allusive, and is no longer

64 / Fatal Strategies

based either on an imperative or on the utterance of a law (we
should invent the dissuasive mode, based on the nonutterance of
the law and on floating retorsion) but plays on the enigmatic
form of terror.

Terror is obscene, in that it puts an end to the scene of inter¬
diction and violence, which at least was familiar to us.

Blackmail is obscene, in that it puts an end to the scene of
exchange.

The hostage is himself obscene. He is obscene because he no
longer represents anything (this is the very definition of obscenity).
He is in a state of pure and simple exhibition. A pure object,
without an image, deceased before being dead. Frozen in a state of
decease. Cryogenized in his own way.

This was the triumph of the Red Brigades in the kidnapping
of Aldo Moro: to demonstrate, by putting him out of action
(with the complicity of the Christian Democrats, who rushed to
drop him), that he represented nothing, and suddenly to make
him the nul equivalent of the State. Power, thus reduced to its
anonymous remains, no longer even has any importance as a
cadaver, and can end up in the trunk of a car, in a way shameful
to all, and thus also obscene, since it no longer even has any
meaning. (In the traditional political order one never would have
taken a prince or a king hostage—one might kill him, but even
then his corpse is powerful.)

The obscenity of the hostage is verified by the impossibility of
getting rid of him (the Red Brigades experienced that with Moro,
too). It is the obscenity of someone who is already dead—this is why
he is politically unusable. Obscene by his disappearance, he
becomes the mirror of the visible obscenity of power. (In this, the
Red Brigades had completely succeeded; his death, on the other

Figures of the Transpolitical / 65

hand, was much more problematic, for while it is true that dying in
itself serves no purpose—you have to know how to disappear—it is
also true that it serves no purpose to kill: you have to know how to
make someone disappear).

Imagine Judge D’Urso, found bound and gagged in a car—not
dead, but with headphones on his head and symphonic music blasting
through them: transistorized. Sacred shit that the Red Brigades
managed each time to throw at the feet of the Communist Party.

This obscenity, this exhibitionist stand of terrorism, contrary
to the opposite stand of secrecy in sacrifice and ritual, explains its
affinity with the media, themselves the obscene stage of informa¬
tion. It is said that without the media there would be no terrorism.
And it is true that terrorism does not exist in itself as an original
political act: it is the hostage of the media, just as they are hostage
to it. There is no end to this chain of blackmail—everyone is the
hostage of the other: this is the end of our so-called “social” rela¬
tion. Besides, there is another factor behind all of this, which is
something like the womb of this circular blackmail: the masses,
without which there would be neither media nor terrorism.

The masses are the absolute prototype of the hostage, of the thing
taken hostage, that is, annulled in its sovereignty, abolished and
nonexistent as subject—but take note—radically inexchangeable as
object. As with the hostage, there is nothing one can do with him,
and one doesn’t know how to get rid of him. This is the unforget¬
table revenge of the hostage, and the unforgettable revenge of the
the masses. This is the fatality of manipulation: that it can never be,
or take the place of, strategy.

Only by nostalgia, in fact, can we even distinguish an active
manipulator from someone who is passively manipulated—thus

66 / Fatal Strategies

reverberating the old relationships of domination and violence into
this new era of soft technologies. Take just one of the figures of
manipulation, the minimal unit question/answer in interviews,
polls and other forms of directive solicitation. Certainly, the answer
is induced by the question. But the one who asks the question has
no more autonomy: he can only ask questions which have a chance
of getting a circular reply—he is caught in exactly the same vicious
circle. There can be no strategy on his part; there is manipulation on
both sides. The game is even, or rather the stakes are equally nil.

The Moro case already offered a beautiful example of this
zero-sum strategy, whose black-box was the media, with the inert
and fascinated masses acting as amplifier. A gigantic cycle with four
protagonists, where an unfindable responsibility circulates—the
revolving stage of the transpolitical.

In the translucent person of Moro it is the empty, absent State
(the power that traverses us without reaching us, that we traverse
without reaching it) that is held hostage by terrorists, themselves
clandestine and untakable—both sides desperately aping power
and counterpower. Impossible to negotiate—Moro’s death means
that there is nothing left to negotiate between two partners who
are, in fact, each others hostage, as in any system of unlimited
responsibility. (Traditional society is a society of limited responsi¬
bility* and it is for this reason that it can function. In a society of
unlimited responsibility—that is, where the terms of exchange no
longer exchange anything, but are continually exchanged among
themselves—the whole just revolves about itself, producing nothing
more than effects of vertigo and fascination. One must admit that

* Translator’s note: Societe a responsabilite limitee (S.A.R.L.) is the French equiv¬
alent of the English business term “incorporated” (Inc.)

Figures of the Transpolitical / 67

Italy, which has already given history its most beautiful spectacles,
Venice, the Church, trompe-l’oeil, and opera, presents us today, in
the spectacle of terrorism, with its most fertile and baroque
episode, and this with the general complicity of the whole of Italian
society: terrorismo dell’arte.)

In the kidnapping of Judge D’Urso things take another turn. It is no
longer so much the official State against the free and clandestine
terrorists; it is the imprisoned terrorists, promoted to the rank of
judges from the depths of their prisons (while Judge D’Urso is sym¬
bolically taken into detention) against the confidentiality of official
investigations (the media pretends they do not exist). The poles
have switched: the terrorist prisoners, in some sense liberated from
clandestinity, no longer negotiate with the political class, but with
the “media” class.

In reality, it also appears that:

—There is nothing to negotiate: the texts whose distribution
the Red Brigades demanded are politically ridiculous and, fur¬
thermore, an open secret.

-The State has no more idea of what to do with the prison¬
ers—more trouble in prison than underground—than the Red
Brigades with their hostage.

There remains the effect of revolving responsibility that the Red
Brigades manage to create, and where the State, the political class
and the media themselves are found responsible for the likely
death of D’Urso, as much as the terrorists. To circulate maximal
responsibility gratuitously is equivalent to setting off general irre¬
sponsibility, thereby demolishing the social contract. The rules of

68 / Fatal Strategies

the political game are abolished not by the strict exercise of vio¬
lence, but by the maddened circulation of acts and implications,
effects and causes, and by the forced circulation of values of State
such as violence, responsibility, justice, etc.

Such pressure is fatal for the political scene. It is accompanied by
an implicit ultimatum which goes approximately as follows:
“What price will you pay to be rid of terrorism?” Understood:
terrorism is still a lesser evil than a police state capable of ending
it. It is possible that we secretly acquiesce in this fantastic propo¬
sition. There’s no need of “political consciousness” for this; it’s a
secret balance of terror that makes us guess that a spasmodic
eruption of violence is preferable to its rational exercise within the
framework of the State, or to total prevention at the price of a total
programmatic domination.

It is in any case preferable that something offsets the State in its
omnipotence. If the mediations which assured this relative equilib¬
rium have disappeared, along with the rules of the political game, if
the social contract has disappeared at the same time as the possi¬
bility of our inventing ourselves socially, that is to say, of
spontaneously sacrificing a portion of our liberty with a view to the
collective well-being, for the simple reason that everything is already
virtually taken care of by the State (here, too, there is an end of
exchange: the individual can no longer even negotiate his parcel of
liberty, lacking which he looks upon himself as a hostage, an insured
zombie), it is then inevitable that the State—in keeping with the
disappearance of the political scene—arouse a form, at the same
time radical and phantasmatic, of contestation: the phantom of
terrorism, which plays the same game as it does, and with whom the
State draws up a sort of perverse new social contract.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 69

In any case this ultimatum leaves the State with no response left,
for it calls on it to make itself more terrorist than the terrorists. And
it throws the media into an insoluble dilemma: if you want no more
terrorism, then you must renounce information itself.

This question of the hostage is fascinating because it poses the
problem of the inexchangeable. Exchange is our law, and exchange
has its rules. We are now in a society where exchange is becoming
more and more improbable, where fewer and fewer things can
really be negotiated because the rules for them have been lost, or
because exchange, by becoming more generalized, has brought
about the emergence of the last objects irreducible to exchange—
and these have become the real stakes.

We are living the end of exchange. However, only exchange pro¬
tects us from destiny. Where exchange is no longer possible, we find
ourselves in a fatal situation, a situation of destiny.

The inexchangeable is the pure object, whose power forbids
either possessing or exchanging it. It is something very precious that
we don’t quite know how to get rid of. It burns, and isn’t negotiable.
It can be killed, but it takes revenge. The corpse always plays this
role. Beauty, too, and the fetish as well. It has no value, but is price¬
less. It is an object of no interest, and at the same time absolutely
singular, without equivalent, and almost sacred.

The hostage has both qualities at the same time: an annulled,
abolished, anonymous object, and at the same time absolutely
different, exceptional, of high intensity, dangerous, sublime (as
dangerous as the terrorist: ask those whose job it is to free the
hostages if the latter do not inspire, by their very existence, by
their very presence, the same terror as the terrorist. Furthermore,
to liquidate the situation, the elimination of the hostages is
objectively equivalent to that of the terrorists; governments will

70 / Fatal Strategies

choose sometimes one solution, sometimes the other, according
to the juncture).

For all these reasons the hostage is secretly no longer nego¬
tiable, precisely because of his absolute convertibility. No situation
embodies this paradox to such an extent: torn from the circuit of
exchange, the hostage becomes exchangeable against anything at
all. Become sacred by substraction, by the state of radical excep¬
tion in which he is put, the hostage becomes the fantastic
equivalent of everything else.

The hostage is not far from the fetish or talisman—an object
also cut off from the context of the world to become the center of a
singular operation, that of the omnipotence of thought. Games, in
particular, games of chance, are about nothing else: money, taken
out of circulation and destined to be lost, becomes the stakes of a
prodigious convertibility, a mental manipulation by thought only
possible when money has taken the form of pure object, perfectly
artificial: fictitious, a fetish.

But we know that the fetish cannot be reabsorbed into the ordi¬
nary world (which excludes the omnipotence thought), nor can
gaming money be put back into the economic circuit—this is the
secret law of the other circuit. Likewise, there are the greatest diffi¬
culties in converting the hostage into financial or political currency.
That is the illusion of the terrorist—the terrorist illusion in general:
the exchange never happens, and is impossible. Just as in torture,
where the suffering of the tortured is inconvertible into political
profits, or even into pleasure for the torturers, the terrorist can never
change the hostage back; he has somehow ripped him too violently
from reality to be able to give it back to him.

Taking a hostage is at once the desperate attempt to radicalize
the balance of power and to recreate an exchange at the summit, to

Figures of the Transpolitical / 71

render an object or an individual inestimably valuable by seizure
and disappearance (therefore by absolute scarcity), and at the same
time the paradoxical failure of this attempt, for, since the violation
amounts to an annulment of the subject, this exchange-value col¬
lapses in the very hands of the terrorists. On the other hand, in the
kind of situation created in this way, the system quickly manages to
notice that it can function without this individual (Moro, for exam¬
ple) and that in some sense it is even better not to get him back, for
a hostage who gets off is more dangerous than a dead one: he is
contaminated; his only power is one of malefic contamination. (It
would have been good strategy, on the part of the Red Brigades,
after having annuled Moro as a statesman, to throw back this
zombie whom no one wanted anymore, the marked card that would
have upset the whole political game. It would then have been up to
others to get rid of him.)

If convertibility is impossible, it turns out that, in the final
analysis, the terrorist never exchanges anything but his own life
against the life of the hostage. And this explains the strange com¬
plicity that ends up bringing them together. Violently withdrawing
the hostage from the circuit of value, the terrorist also withdraws
him from the circuit of negotiation. The two are out of circulation,
accomplices in their state of exception, and what is established
between them, beyond an impossible convertibility, is a dual figure,
a figure of reduction perhaps—the only modern figure of shared
death, while still being the extreme figure of indifferent death—so
indifferent as to be inexchangeable.

Or else one should realize that hostage-taking never has negoti¬
ation as its goal: it produces the inexchangeable. The “How do we
get rid of terrorism?” is a false problem. The situation is original in
that it is inextricable. One must conceive of terrorism as a utopian

72 / Fatal Strategies

act, proclaiming inexchangeability from the beginning, and violently
so, experimentally staging an impossible exchange, and thereby
verifying at its limit a banal situation, our own, that of the histori¬
cal loss of the scene of exchange, the rule(s) of exchange, and the
social contract. For where is the other now? With whom do we
negotiate what is left of our liberty and sovereignty, with whom do
we play the game of subjectivity and alienation, with whom do we
negotiate over my image in the mirror?

What has disappeared is that good old alterity of relation, that good
old investment of the subject in the contract and rational exchange,
the site of both profitability and hope. It all yields to a state of
exception, a mad speculation which is more like a duel or a provo¬
cation. Hostage-taking is a speculation of this order—ephemeral,
senseless, instantaneous. It is not essentially political, but insists on
identifying itself from the very first as the dream of a fantastic deal,
the dream of an impossible exchange, and also as a denunciation of
the impossibility of this exchange.

The Obscene

All these figures that appear to be those of an exacerbated indifference,
of an exacerbation of emptiness, of obesity, of terror, are also figures of
the loss of illusion, play and scene, and therefore figures of the obscene.

Loss of the scene of the body for the obese, loss of the scene of
exchange for the hostage, loss of the sexual scene in obscenity, etc.
But also an evanescence of the scene of the social, political and
theatrical. And everywhere a loss of the secret, of distance, and of
the mastery of illusion.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 73

We have completely forgotten the form of sovereignty that
consists of the operation of simulacra as such. But culture has never
been anything but that: the collective sharing of simulacra, as
opposed to the compulsory sharing of the real and of meaning
today. Sovereignty lies only in the mastery of appearances, and
complicity lies only in the collective sharing of illusion and secret.

Everything that forgets this scene and this mastery of illusion
and veers toward the simple hypothesis and mastery of the real falls
into the obscene. The mode of apparition of illusion is that of the
scene; the mode of apparition of the real is that of the obscene.

There exists a terror, as well as a fascination, of the perpetual engen¬
dering of the same by the same. This confusion is exactly that of
nature, the natural confusion of things, and only artifice can put an
end to it. Only artifice can dispel this lack of differentiation, this
coupling of same to same.

Nothing is worse than the truer than the true. Take the clone, or
the automaton in the story of the illusionist. In the latter, what is ter¬
rifying is not the disappearance of the natural into the perfection of
the artificial (the automaton made by the illusionist imitated every
human movement so perfectly as to be indiscernible from the illu¬
sionist himself). It is, on the contrary, the disappearance of artifice
into the obviousness of the natural. Here lies something unbearably
scandalous. This lack of differentiation brings us back to terrifying
nature. This is why the magician will instead counterfeit the real
robot, with its slightly mechanical rigidity of motion, to restore,
against the terror of resemblance, the play and power of illusion.

That which is no longer illusion is dead and inspires terror. This
is what the cadaver does, as does the clone, and more generally,

74 / Fatal Strategies

anything that can be so confused with itself that it is no longer
even capable of playing its own appearance. This limit of disillu¬
sion is that of death.

Against the true of the true, against the truer than true (which
immediately becomes pornographic), against the obscenity of obvi¬
ousness, against this unclean promiscuity with itself that we call
resemblance, we must remake illusion, rediscover illusion, this
power, at once immoral and maleficent, to tear the same away from
the same, called seduction. Seduction against terror: these are the
stakes. There are no others.

The erasure of all scene, of all power of illusion, the disappear¬
ance of distance, of that space maintained by ceremonial or the rules
of the game—the triumph of promiscuity in every domain. Eroti-
cization and sexualization are only the expression of this mix-up, of
this confusion of all roles. Psychology in particular, always ambigu¬
ous and unhappy, is linked to the loss of distinct scenic spaces and
all rules of the game. The “other scene,” that of the unconscious and
of fantasy, cannot make up for the loss of that more fundamental
one of illusion.

Illusion is not false, for it doesn’t use false signs; it uses senseless
signs, signs that point nowhere. This is why it deceives and disap¬
points our demand for meaning, but it does so enchantingly.

This is what the image does in general, more subtly than the real,
since it has only two dimensions and is therefore always more seduc¬
tive (it really is the devil who peopled the world with them). The same
is true of trompe I’oeil: adding the illusion of the real to painting, it
is somehow falser than false—a second-degree simulacrum.

Seduction is also falser than the false, since it uses signs,
which are already semblances, to make them lose their meaning—
it abuses signs and subjects. Someone who has never lost the

Figures of the Transpolitical / 75

meaning of a word or a look cannot know what this loss is, that of
abandoning oneself to the total illusion of signs, to immediate
control by appearances, that is, going beyond the false into the
absolute abyss of artifice.

The false does nothing but intrigue our sense of truth; the falser
than false carries us beyond this, and ravishes us without the pos¬
sibility of appeal. In the real world the true and the false balance
each other, and what is gained by one is lost to the other. In the
movement of seduction (this also applies to the work of art) it is as
if the false were resplendent in all the power of the true. It is as if
illusion were resplendent in all the power of truth. What can we do
about any of this? No more real, no more meaning holds. When a
form is resplendent with inverse energy, when the energy of the false
shines with the power of the true, or when the Good shines with
the energy of Evil—when, instead of setting them in opposition to
each other, a kind of singular anamorphosis guides the transpari-
tion of one form into the other, the transparition of one energy
into its inverse, what could one oppose to this singular movement?

In this ascent to the limit a logic of the simultaneity of inverse
effects comes into play. Perhaps we should radically oppose the
effects of obscenity to those of seduction; but might it not also be
necessary to accumulate them and grasp them together in their
inextricable anamorphosis?

Thus, in the movement of money both the total obscenity and
the secret illusion of value are combined in striking fashion.

Gaming is wonderful, because it is at the same time the locus
of the ecstasy of value and that of its disappearance. Not its trans¬
gression in potlach and expenditure—that would still be Bataille’s
transcendental utopia, the ultimate dream of political economy. No,
in gaming money is neither produced nor destroyed; it disappears as

76 / Fatal Strategies

value and rises again as appearance, returned to its pure appearance,
in the immediate reversibility of gain and loss.

The obscenity of gaming is total, because there is no longer any
appeal to any depth or value whatsoever: here money is naked,
metamorphosed into pure circulation, pure fascination, formal
passion, transparent, cold and superficial jouissance. Disembodied
lewdness, the ecstatic form of value.

But the secret of gaming is also total: it is that money does not
exist. It is like the secret of power: that there is none—or that of
seduction: that desire does not exist. Money exists neither as
essence, nor as substance, nor as value. And gaming returns it to its
inexistence.

This is just the opposite of political economy and exchange,
where money is loaded with the whole symbolic operation of value.
Here, money is distributed as pure simulacrum, relieved of all
obscenity and circulating only according to the arbitrary rules of
the game.

The secret of gaming is that money has no meaning. It exists
only as appearance. There the substance of value is volatilized by
the play of appearances, by the arbitrariness of play.

If money can self-generate so insanely, just as numbers can be
multiplied by a simple mental operation, it is possible only because
it does not exist. It’s like in the game where one is supposed to
memorize as many words as possible; you get much further when
you can forget the meaning of the words.

This is not a matter of consumption or spending; you must
passionately believe in money and value in order to consume them,
just as you must believe passionately in the law in order to transgress
it. Those are hot passions. Here, one must believe in nothing; you
must have a secret, that of the nonexistence of money, if not its

Figures of the Transpolitical / 77

power of appearance and metamorphosis (or what amounts to the
same thing, the absolute power of simulation of gaming). It is a cool
passion, a form of cold ecstasy. Calculation is part of it, as are the
rules and anything that shares in the savage ritual of appearance.
Calculation here functions as a mask, with the same intensity as the
mask. It regulates, beyond appearances, the play of mobile divini¬
ties, the hidden objectivity behind the subjectivity of appearances.

But if the false can be transparent with all the power of the true—
such is the sublime form of illusion and seduction—the true, too,
can be transparent with all the power of the false—and this is the
form of obscenity.

This is the obscene: the truer than true, the fullness of sex, the
ecstasy of sex, pure and empty form, the truly tautological form of
sexuality (tautology alone is perfectly true), the joining of same to
same. It is sex caught in its own exhibition, fixed in its organic,
orgasmic excrescence, like the body in obesity, or cells in cancerous
metastases. Not a vile, caricatured and simplified form of sexuality,
but the logical exacerbation of the sexual function, the more sex than
sex, sex elevated to the set power—what is obscene is not the copula¬
tion of bodies, but rather the mental redundancy of sex, the escalation
of truth which leads to the cold vertigo of the pornographic.

This is the very same process that leads to the enchanted ver¬
tigo of seduction. The full through which only the empty appears
(this spectacular absence of sensuality and pleasure is the failure
of the pornographic universe)—that is the obscene. The fading of
sense, the ephemerality of the sign through which the most
extreme pleasure appears—that is seduction. But in both cases we
see a quality outbid itself in its reaching towards its pure form, its
ecstatic radiation.

78 / Fatal Strategies

And it is not only a quality which can go into such ecstasy; the
absence of a quality can do so as well: there is an ecstatic radiation
of the neutral, and the neutral itself can be potentiated. This leads
to something monstrous, monstrous effect, a good part of which
comes from obscenity. Pornography is precisely an art of exhibiting
the neutral, of the compulsory radiation of the neutral.

Essentially sexual obscenity is pious and hypocritical, for it distracts
us from conceiving of obscenity in its general form. This is charac¬
teristic of any form that becomes fixed in its apparition, that loses
the ambiguity of absence to exhaust itself in an exacerbated visibility.

More visible than the visible—this is the obscene.

More invisible than the invisible—this is the secret.

The scene is in the order of the visible. But there is no longer
a scene of the obscene; there is nothing but the dilation of the
visibility of all things to the point of ecstasy. The obscene is the end
of any scene. Furthermore it is a bad omen, as its name indicates.
For this hypervisibility of things is also the imminence of their end,
the sign of the apocalypse. All signs carry it on themselves, and not
only the infrasensual and disembodied signs of sex. Along with the
end of the secret, it is our fatal condition. If all enigmas are
resolved, the stars go out. If everything secret is returned to the
visible (and more than to the visible: to obscene obviousness), if
all illusion is returned to transparence, then heaven becomes
indifferent to the earth. In our culture everything is sexualized
before disappearing. This is no longer sacred prostitution but a sort
of spectral lewdness taking hold of idols, signs, institutions, dis¬
courses; the allusion, the obscene inflection that takes hold of every
discourse, is the surest sign of their disappearance.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 79

There is no obscenity when sex is in sex, or when the social is in the
social and nowhere else. But today it overflows everywhere, like
sexuality—we speak of the social “relationship” like the sexual “rela¬
tionship.” This is no longer a mythical, transcendent sociality, but a
pathetic sociality of rapprochement, of contact (as in lenses),
prosthesis, reassurance. It is a social in mourning, an incessant
group hallucination of its lost determination. The group is haunted
by sociality like the individual is by sex—both are haunted sexually
by their disappearance.

Today we are all social workers. What is this social, that is no
more than work? That no longer even believes in its own existence
in fact or in law, that believes only in its forced reproduction, in the
framework of a market where it sees itself as subjected, like any
other commodity, to the law of scarcity, production and exchange?
And also to advertising, since everywhere in the media, in ideology
and in discourses, it is the social that does its own advertising.

In a world where the energy of the public scene, the energy of
the social as myth and illusion (whose intensity is maximal in
utopias) is in the process of disappearing, the social becomes
monstrous and obese, and dilates to the dimension of a kennel, a
mammary body, cellular and glandular. Once exemplified in its
heroes, it is now indexed on its handicapped, defectives, degener¬
ates, feeble-minded, and asocial—in a gigantic enterprise of
therapeutic nursery school.

The social can exist only within certain limits, where it is
imposed as something at stake, as myth—I would almost say as
destiny, as a challenge, and never as reality, in which case it is
annihilated in the game of supply and demand. The body also is
annulled in the game of sexual supply and demand, and it, too, loses
that mythical power which makes it an object of seduction ....

80 / Fatal Strategies

As for the social, one can say that its obscenity is today fully
realized; it is that of the body you don’t know how to get rid of, or
more exactly it enters the accursed phase of decay. It is then, before
drying out and taking on the beauty of death, that the body passes
through a truly obscene phase and must at all costs be conjured and
exorcized, for it no longer represents anything, no longer has a
name, and its unnamable contamination invades everything.

Everything that is imposed by its objective presence, that is, by
abjection, everything that no longer possesses either the secret or the
lightness of absence, everything that, like the rotting body, is given
over solely to the material operation of its decomposition, every¬
thing which, with no illusion possible, is surrendered to the sole
operation of the real, everything which, without mask, makeup or
face, is given over to the pure operation of sex and death—all this
can be called obscene and pornographic.

Many things are obscene because they have too much meaning,
because they take up too much space. They thus attain an exorbitant
representation of the truth, that is to say, the apogee of the simulacrum.

When everything is political, it is the end of the political as
destiny; it is the beginning of the political as culture, and means the
immediate impoverishment of this political culture.

When everything becomes cultural, it is the end of culture as
destiny; it is the beginning of culture as politics, and means the
immediate impoverishment of this cultural politics.

The same is true for the social, for history, economy, and sex.
The point of maximal extension of these categories, once distinct
and specific, marks a point of banalisation and the inauguration of
a transpolitical sphere that is first of all that of their disappearance.
The end of fatal strategies—and the beginning of banal strategies.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 81

We thought we discovered something subversive when we affirmed
that the body, sports and fashion were political.

We have only precipitated their indififerentiation into an analyti¬
cal and ideological fog—a little like discovering that all illnesses are
psychosomatic. A wonderful discovery, but one which gets you
nowhere: it just assigns them to a more poorly defined category.

Everywhere the widely accepted obviousness of a generalization
of this order—political, cultural, social, sexual, psychological—
marks its death sentence. Interdisciplinary structures in all their
forms are symptoms of this: every discipline is aligned on the degen¬
erated concepts of another.

Or else, with this melange of concepts and categories, as with
the mixing and promiscuity of the races, one should imagine the
baroque effects of transfiguration—effects visible in America in the
violence of indifference, the violence of juxtaposition, the violence
of promiscuity—the new scene of the obscene. It is as if obscenity
has been transfigured by acceleration, by the corpuscular speed of
bodies, signs, and images.

Obscenity takes on all the semblances of modernity. We are used to
seeing it, first of all, in the perpetration of sex, but it extends to
everything that can be perpetrated in the visible—it becomes the
perpetration of the visible itself. Murderous prostitution, like certain
hyperreal films from South America, where the sadistic violence on
the screen is perpetrated for real during the filming. A murderous
aberration? This is not so certain, for it is consistent with the fantasy
of the integral restitution of the real, and of the resurrection of detail
characteristic of porn, but also of “retro,” in the register of the
past, or of the “rendered” and the “lived” in the register of life pure
and simple.

82 / Fatal Strategies

Porn is after what can be rendered from sex, and “retro” aims at
what can be rendered from the event, the cultural trait and the
historical character—almost hallucinated in its detail and expurgated
of all nostalgia by virtue of its overexact signs. This really is exaction:
you expel things into the real, and force them to mean something.
But perhaps things are never “true” except at this price: being led
under too garish a light, with too high a standard of fidelity.

So from here on everything real has passed into pornographic
hyperreality, all of the present has passed into “retro,” and that
entire charming little music of meaning has passed into the
stereophony of signals which lulls us to sleep.

This is the obscenity of everything that is tirelessly filmed,
filtered, reviewed and corrected under the wide-angle lens of the
social, of morality and information. Those lives extorted right on
television, the whole of la France profonde made to submit to
public confession and contrition, even animals are subjected to
educational blackmail: previously you could see a giraffe giving
birth on a live broadcast; today the program goes to a school, where
we see the animals as seen by children, etc. The slightest film will
be shown only at the price of an aimless and idiotic discussion: the
soft technology of culture, outrageous socialization, the rampant
obscenity of uninterrupted social commentary.

Solicitation, sensitivization, being plugged in, targeting, con¬
tact, connection—all this terminology is that of a white obscenity,
one of dejection and uninterrupted abjection. This is the obscenity
of change, of this ferocious fluidity of signs and values, of this
total extroversion of behaviour into the operational.... The white
and impersonal objectivity of polls and statistics—the masses
having to reveal their secrets, even if they don’t have any. Everyone
must deliver his secret, cross the threshold of silence and enter the

Figures of the Transpolitical / 83

immanent space of communication, where even that minimal
dimension of looking is erased. Looking is never obscene, whatever
one says about it. What is obscene, on the other hand, is that which
can no longer be looked at, nor, it follows, seduced—everything,
animate or inanimate, that can no longer be enveloped by the
minimal seduction of the glance and is doomed, naked and with
no secret, to immediate devouring.

Obscenity is the absolute proximity of the thing seen, the gaze
stuck in the screen of vision—hypervision in close-up, a dimension
without any distance, the total promiscuity of the look with what it
sees. Prostitution.

We, particularly in the West, devour faces like sexes, in their
psychological nudity, in their affectation of truth and desire.
Stripped of masks, of signs, of ceremonial, they shine, in effect, with
the obscenity of their demand. And we submit to the solicitation of
this unfindable truth, and spend all our energy on this vacuous
decipherment. Only appearances, that is to say, signs that do not let
meanings filter through, protect us from this irradiation, this loss of
substance in the empty space of truth.

The face stripped of its masks is no more than a sexual organ;
the body stripped of its appearances is naked and obscene (although
nudity can clothe the body and protect it from obscenity).

It is doubtless impossible to strip a body or a face totally of its
appearances and yield it up to the pure concupiscence of looking,
to strip it of its aura and yield it to the pure concupiscence of
desire, to strip it of its secret and yield it to the pure operation of
decipherment. But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the
obscene, its power to exterminate all ambiguity and all seduction
and deliver us to the definitive fascination of bodies without faces,
faces without eyes, and eyes that don’t look. Maybe this, by the way,

84 / Fatal Strategies

is what attracts us in advance: a perfectly ecstatic and obscene
universe of pure objects, transparent to each other, which would
shatter against each other like pure kernels of truth.

This obscenity drags away with it whatever remained of an illusion
of depth and the last question that could still be asked of a disen¬
chanted world: is there a hidden meaning?

When everything is oversignified, meaning itself becomes
impossible to grasp. When all values are overexposed, in some
kind of indifferent ecstasy (including the social in the socialism of
present-day France), it is the very credibility of the value which is
annihilated.

Thus there could have been a kind of ruse on the part of tradi¬
tional pornography. Porn basically says: there is good sex
somewhere, since I am its caricature. There is some measure, since
I am its excess. But this is precisely the question: is there good sex
somewhere, sex as an ideal value of the body, as a “desire” that must
be liberated? The virtual state of things, that of total explicitness of
sex, answers: no. Sex can be perfectly liberated, perfectly transparent,
without desire and without pleasure (it still functions).

This same question was put to political economy: beyond the
exchange-value incarnating the abstraction and inhumanity of
capitalism, is there some good substance to value, some ideal use-
value of commodity which can and should be liberated? We know
very well that the answer is no, that use-value has disappeared over
the horizon of exchange-value and was only a paradoxical dream
of political economy.

This is the very issue of the social: above and beyond, beneath this
terrorist and hyperreal sociality, this ubiquitous blackmail of commu¬
nication, is there some good substance to the social, some ideality of

Figures of the Transpolitical / 85

social relationship that can and should be liberated? The answer is
obviously no: the equilibrium and harmony of a certain social con¬
tract has disappeared over the horizon of history, and we are
doomed to this diaphanous obscenity of change. We mustn’t believe
we are living the realization of some evil utopia—we are living the
realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real.

The same is true for theater and scenic illusion.

Baroque theater was still a kind of extravagance of representa¬
tion. Indissociable from feasts, fountains, fireworks, machine-like
artifices (the great mechanical technologies were inaugurated then, in
the production of theatrical illusion) the scenic illusion (of the stage)
is total. Just like trompe-l’oeil , its contemporary simulacrum, more
real than the real, but without trying to confuse itself with the real:
on the contrary: by virtue of machines, artifact, technique, and coun¬
terfeit the real is challenged according to its own rules. Likewise for
perspective in painting from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century:
the way it is used is often illusionist and operatic. It remains a staging,
a strategy of appearances, not of the real—illusion keeps its power
without giving up its secret (there isn’t any).

But we will make it confess anyway. We will capture theater in
the trap of representation. Starting in the eighteenth century, it
becomes loaded with the “real”; the stage moves away from
machine-like simulation and the metaphysics of illusion, and the
naturalist form wins out. The stage trades the prestige of meta¬
morphosis for the discreet charm of transcendence. The critical era
of theater begins, the contemporary of social antagonisms, psy¬
chological conflicts, and of the critical age in general.

1 here is still something at stake, however, at the level of this
representation. Theater, even if it no longer has the energy of

86 / Fatal Strategies

metamorphosis or the sacred effects of illusion, retains a critical
energy and a sort of sacrilegious charm—this includes the separa¬
tion of the stage from the audience, also a critical form, a space
of transcendence and judgment.

Artaud is no doubt the latest figure who has wanted to save the
theater by tearing it from the decaying scenario of the real, antici¬
pating the end of representation, and reinjecting it, by virtue of
cruelty, with something prior even to illusion and simulacrum,
something of the savage operation of sign upon reality or of the
lack of distinction between the two that still characterizes theaters
of the unreal (the Peking Opera, Balinese theater, and sacrifice itself
as a scene of murderous illusion).

Today this critical energy of the stage—not to mention, of
course, its power of illusion—is in the process of being swept away.
All that theatrical energy goes into the denial of the scenic illusion
and into anti theater in all its forms. If for a while the form of theater
and the form of the real were in dialectical play with each other,
today it is the pure and empty form of theater which plays with the
pure and empty form of the real. Illusion is proscribed; the scission
between stage and audience is abolished; theater goes down into the
street and into everydayness; it claims to invest the whole of the real,
dissolve into it, and at the same time transfigure it. The paradox is at
its height. All the “exploded” forms of animation, creativity and
expression, happening and acting out—theater takes on the form of
a generalized therapeutic psychodrama. This is no longer the famous
Aristotelian catharsis of the passions. Rather, it is a treatment of
detoxicification and reanimation. Illusion is no longer valid here: it
is truth which bursts into free expression. We are all actors and spec¬
tators; there is no more stage: the stage is everywhere; no more rules:
everyone plays out his own drama, improvising on his own fantasies.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 87

The obscene form of antitheater, present everywhere.

But also that of antipedagogy and antipsychiatry, where
madness and knowledge are lost in psychodramatic complicity, as
well as of antipsychoanalysis, where the analysand and the analyst
end up exchanging roles. Everywhere a stage disappears, and
everywhere the poles that sustained intensity or difference are
stricken with inertia.

Or that of artificial resurrection, which is one of the forms
obscenity takes. One of the most significant turns of events is
seeing the scene of work—also in the process of disappearing—
reactivated, vacuum-packed, so to speak, in the German factory-
simulacra where the psychosocial lived experience of the work
process is preserved for the use of the unemployed, and in the
absence of any “real” production. A marvelous hallucination of the
modern world: the unemployed are paid to reperform gratuitously,
so to speak, the same actions as for production, but in a sphere that
is now perfectly useless. This is truly the ecstasy of work; they are
living out the ecstatic form of work. And at the same time, there is
nothing more obscene or more melancholy than this parody of
work. Here the proletarian becomes a cellophane-wrapped whore.

This white obscenity, this escalation of transparence, reaches its
peak in the collapse of the political scene.

From the eighteenth century on, the latter is moralized and
becomes serious. It becomes the locus of a fundamental signified:
the people, the will of the people, social contradictions, etc. It is
called upon to fulfil the ideal of a good representation.

‘While previous political life, like that of the court, was played
out in a theatrical mode, with a basis in play and machination, now
there exists a public space and a system of representation (the break

88 / Fatal Strategies

occurs simultaneously in the theater with the separation of stage and
audience). This is the end of an aesthetics, and the begining of an
ethics of the political, just like some figurative space, from now on
no longer assigned to scenic illusion, but to historical objectivity.

This ethical crystallization of the political scene engenders a
long process of repression (just as linguistic structuring engenders a
repressed of the sign). The obscene has its birth here, in the off-stage,
in the shadows of the system of representation. It is therefore first of
all dark: this is what foils the transparence of the scene, just as the
unconscious and repression destroyed the transparence of conscious¬
ness. The obscene is what is neither visible, nor representable, and
thus possesses an energy of rupture, of transgression, and a hidden
violence. This is traditional obscenity, of the sexually or socially
repressed, of what is neither represented nor representable.

Its otherwise for us: obscenity today is, on the contrary, that of over¬
representation. Our own radical obscenity is no longer that of the
hidden and the repressed, its the transparency of the social itself,
emergence of the social (and of sex) as meaning, reference, evidence.
A total reversal has taken place. And if obscenity was once only a
secondary trait of the repressed? If it was once the Hell of Representa¬
tion—as they talk about the Hell of the National Library—conveying
the charm of interdiction, its fantasies and perversions, today it
bursts out as the principle characteristic of the repressed, exploding
the visible scene into a kind of ecstatic representation.

In the beginning was the secret, and this was the rule of the
game of appearance. Then there was the repressed, and this was the
rule of the game of depth. Finally comes the obscene, and this is
the rule of the game of a world without appearance or depth—a
transparent universe. White obscenity.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 89

Everything obscene is a matter of surface. But there are no
more secrets beneath these superficies. What was kept secret, or
even what didn’t exist found itself expelled forcibly into the real,
represented beyond all necessity and all resemblance. Forcing of
representation. As with porn: an orgasm in color and close up is
neither necessary nor convincing—it is merely implacably true,
even if it is the truth of nothing at all. It is only abjectly visible,
even if it represents nothing at all.

For something to be meaningful, there has to be a scene, and for there
to be a scene, there has to be an illusion, a minimum of illusion, of
imaginary movement, of defiance to the real, which carries you off,
seduces or revolts you. Without this properly aesthetic dimension,
mythical, ludic, there is not even a political scene where something can
happen. And this minimal illusion has disappeared for us: there is no
necessity nor credibility for us in the events of Biafra, Chile, Poland
in terrorism, inflation and nuclear war. We are exposed to an over¬
representation of these things by the media, but still we can’t really
imagine them. All of that, for us, is simply obscene, since images in
the media are made to be seen but not really looked at, hallucinated
in silhouette, absorbed—like sex absorbs the voyeur: from a distance.
Neither spectators, nor actors—we are voyeurs without illusion.

If we’re anesthetized it’s because there’s no more aesthetics (in
the extended meaning of the word) of the political scene, no more
stakes, rules of the game. For information and media are not a
scene, a prospective space, or something that’s performed, but a
screen without depth, a tape perforated with messages and signals to
which corresponds a receiver’s own perforated reading.

Nothing can compensate for this loss of all scene and illu¬
sion—in the automatic simulation of the social, in the automatic

90 / Fatal Strategies

simulation of the political. Especially not the discourses of politicos,
all compelled to simulate each others pathetic gesticulation—
pornographers of indifference whose official obscenity redoubles
and calls attention to the obscenity of a world without illusion.
Furthermore, nobody cares. We are in the ecstasy of the political
and the historical—perfectly formless and impotent, in perfect
solidarity, yet paralyzed, perfectly frozen in a worldwide stereo¬
phonic complex, transpoliticized alive.

Today there is no longer transcendence, but the immanent surface
of the development of operations, smooth surface, operational, of
communication. The Faustian, Promethean period of production
and consumption yields to the Protean era of networks, to the
narcissistic, equally Protean form of branching, contact, contiguity,
feedback, and generalized interface. As with television, the entire
surrounding world, and our own body, becomes a control screen.

The decisive changes in objects and the modern environment
arise from a drift toward formal operational abstraction of elements
and functions, toward their homogenization in a single virtual
process, toward the displacement of gestures, bodies, affects in
electric and electronic control, toward the miniaturization in time
and space of processes whose real scene is that of infinitesimal
memory and the microprocessor.

The time has come of a miniaturization of time, bodies, plea¬
sures. There is no longer any ideal principle for these things on the
scale of the human. There are no longer any but nucleated effects.
This change from the human scale to the nuclear one is obvious
everywhere: this body, our body, appears basically superfluous,
useless in the extension, multiplicity and complexity of its organs,
tissues, functions, since everything today is concentrated on the

Figures of the Transpolitical / 91

brain and genetic formula that resume themselves an operational
definition of being. The countryside, the geographically immense
countryside, seems a desert body whose very extension is needless
(and that eventually it is even boring to traverse), since all events
crystallize in the cities, themselves in the process of reduction to a
few miniaturized showplaces. And time: what to say about this
immense free time that is left to us, too much time, by far, that
envelopes us like a vague terrain, a dimension henceforward useless
to explore, since instantaneity of communication has miniaturized
our exchanges into a succession of instants?

We are no longer in the drama of alienation, we are in the ecstasy
of communication.

The private world was certainly alienated, because it separated
us from others, but it reaped also a symbolic benefit from the
alienation, which is that there is such a thing as difference to
suffer or enjoy, as the case may be. So the consumer society was
lived under the sign of alienation, as society of the spectacle; but
still the spectacle is only spectacle, it is never obscene; obscenity
starts when there is no longer a scene, when everything becomes
inexorably transparent.

Man already denounced the obscenity of the commodity,
linked to the abject principle of its free circulation. The obscenity
of the commodity comes from its abstraction, formal and light,
against the weight and density of the object. The commodity is
readable: contrary to the object, which never confesses completely
its secret, the commodity manifests always its visible essence, which
is its price. It is the formal place of transcription of all posssible
objects: through it they all communicate—it is the first great medium
of communication of the modern world. But the message it delivers

92 / Fata! Strategies

is extremely simplified, and its always the same: it is exchange-
value. Basically, therefore, the message already no longer exists; its
the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation.

We have only to extend this analysis of Marx of the obscenity
of the commodity to decipher the universe of communication.

Not only the sexual becomes obscene in pornography, today
there’s a whole pornography of information and communication,
circuits and networks, a pornography of functions and objects in
their readability, fluidity, availability, regulation, polyvalence, com¬
pulsory meaning, free expression.... This is the obscenity of what
is entirely soluble in communication.

To the black obscenity succeeds a white one—to the hot obscenity,
a cold. The two imply a form of promiscuity: one is that of the
viscera in the body, objects piled up in the private universe, of what
swarms in the silence of repression—organic promiscuity, visceral,
charnel. The other is more a matter of surface saturation, incessant
solicitation and an extermination of interstitial space.

I lift my telephone receiver, that’s it, the whole marginal net¬
work hooks into me, annoys me, with the intolerable good faith
of all that pretends to communicate. Free radio: talks, sings,
expresses—wonderful!—all of that, a fantasy of contents. In terms
of media the result is: a space, that of FM, finds itself saturated,
stations on top of one another mix to the point that there is no
further communication. Something that was free is no longer so at
all—I no longer even get to the point of finding out what it is I
want to hear, so saturated is the space, so urgent is the pressure
from all that wants to be heard.

I fall into the negative ecstasy of radio. There is certainly a
proper state of fascination linked to this delirium of communication,

Figures of the Transpolitical / 93

and therefore a singular pleasure. If you follow Caillois in his clas¬
sification of games—games of expression, competitition, chance,
vertigo—then the drift of contemporary culture is from forms of
expression and competition toward aleatory and vertiginous forms
that are no longer games of scene, mirror, challenge, duel games,
but rather ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic games, where pleasure
is no longer a dramatic and aesthetic matter of meaning, but an
aleatory, psychotropic one of pure fascination. And this is by no
means a negative judgment, since we are certainly dealing here with
a basic mutation in the forms of perception and pleasure. We would
be poor judges of the consequences of this phenomenon, if we try
to apply the criteria and reflexes of our traditional sensibility to it;
we would doubtless be misunderstanding the potentialities of the
event in this new sensorial sphere.

One thing is certain: the scene makes us passionate, but the
obscene fascinates us. In fascination and ecstasy, passion disap¬
pears. The hot universe is investment, desire, passion, seduction,
and also, according to Caillois, expression and competition. The
world of ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, on the other hand, and
also, following Caillois, of the aleatory and vertiginous, is cold,
cool (vertigo is cold, even a drugged one).

In any event we’ll have to tolerate this compulsory extraversion of
all interiority and this forced irruption of all exteriority that signi¬
fies properly the categorical imperative of communication. Should
we call upon the metaphors of pathology? If hysteria was the
pathology of the exacerbated drama of the subject, pathology of
expression, theatrical and operational conversion of the body—if
paranoia was the pathology of the rigid and jealous organization
and structuring of the world on the other hand, with communication,

94 / Fatal Strategies

information and the immanent promiscuity of all networks, with
this cultural branching, we would instead be inside a new form of
schizophrenia. No more hysteria, properly speaking, or projective
paranoia; it is the normal state that terrifies the schizophrenic: the
too-great proximity of everything, unworldly promiscuity of all
things, that contact, invest, penetrate each other without resistance:
no protective aura, not even the body envelopes one. The schizo is
deprived of all scene, open to all in spite of himself, and in the
greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the
world’s obscenity. What characterizes him is less his light-years
distance from the real, a radical break, than absolute proximity, the
total instantaneousness of things, defenseless, with no retreat; end
of interiority and intimacy, overexposure and transparency of the
world that traverses him without his being able to interpose any
barrier: for he can no longer produce the limits of his own being,
and reflect himself; he is only an absorbant screen, a spinning and
insensible plate for all the networks of influence.

If it was true, if it were possible, this obscene and generalized ecstasy
of all functions could well be the state of desired transparency, of
reconciliation of subject and world, that would be for us basically
the Last Judgment; and it already would have taken place.

Two alternatives, equally possible: nothing has yet happened,
our unhappiness comes from nothing having really begun (libera¬
tion, revolution, progress)—finalist utopia. The other eventuality
is that everything has already happened. We are already beyond
the end. All that was metaphor has already materialized, collapsed
into reality. This is our destiny: the end of the end. We are in a
transfinite universe.

Figures of the Transpolitical / 95

Ironic Strategies

WE HAVE TRANSGRESSED EVERYTHING, including the limits of
scene and truth.

We’ve really gone beyond. Imagination is in power; light, intel¬
ligence is in power, were living, or soon will be living, the
perfection of the social. Everything is here, heaven has come down
to earth, the heaven of utopia, and what existed in profile as a radi¬
ant perspective is now lived as a catastrophe in slow motion. We
can almost taste the fatal flavor of material paradises; and trans¬
parency, which was the ideal maxim for the age of alienation, is
realized today in the form of a homogeneous and terrorist space—
hyperinformation, hypersensibility.

No more black magic of the forbidden, alienation and trans¬
gression, but the white magic of ecstasy, fascination, transparency.
It’s the end of the pathos of law. There will be no Final Judgement.
We’ve passed beyond it without realizing it.

Too bad. We’re in paradise. Illusion is no longer possible. It has
always braked the real, but now no longer holds; and we are wit¬
nesses to the unfurling of the real in a world without illusions. Even
the historical illusion which maintained the hope of the conver¬
gence in the infinite of the real and the rational, and thereby a
metaphysical tension, is dissipated: the real has become the rational.

This conjunction has been realized under the sign of the hyperreal,
ecstatic form of the real. All metaphysical tension has been dissi¬
pated, yielding a pataphysical ambiance, that is, the tautological
and grotesque perfection of the truth processes. Ubu: the small
intestine and the splendor of the void. Ubu: full and obese form,
grotesquely immanent, strikingly true, a figure of genius, replete
with that which has absorbed everything, transgressed everything,
and radiates in the void like an imaginary solution.

Would God have fallen into this strategy, unworthy of him, of
reconciling man with his own image, at the end of a Last Judge¬
ment that would bring him indefinitely closer to his ideal goal?
Fortunately not: Gods strategy is such that he maintains man in
suspense, hostile to his image, elevating Evil to the power of a prin¬
ciple and marvelously sensitive to any seduction that turns him
away from his goal.

There is no reality principle, nor one of pleasure. There is
only a final principle of reconciliation and an infinite one of Evil
and Seduction.

Beyond the ecstasy of the social, of sex, of the body, information,
the Evil Principle keeps watch, evil genie of the social, the object,
irony of passion.

Beyond the final principle of the subject there stands the fatal
reversibility of the object, pure object, pure event (the fatal),
mass-object (silence), fetish-object, femininity-object (seduction).
Everywhere today, after centuries of triumphant subjectivity, the
irony of the object lies in wait for us, an objective irony readable at
the very heart of information and of science, at the very heart of the
system and its laws, at the heart of desire and of all psychology.

98 / Fatal Strategies

The Evil Genie of the Social

Neither the morality nor the positive value system of a society
makes for progress, but rather its immorality and vice.

It is never the Good nor the Virtuous, whether it be the ideal
and platonic one in morality, or the pragmatic and objective one in
science and technology that controls the changes or the vitality of a
society; the catalytic impulse comes from debauchery, whether of
images, ideas or signs.

The rational systems of morality, value, science, reason com¬
mand only the linear evolution of societies, their visible history. But
the deeper energy that pushes even these things forward comes from
elsewhere. From prestige, challenge, from all the seductive or antag¬
onistic impulses, including suicidal ones, which have nothing to do
with asocial morality or a morality of history or progress.

Competition is stronger than any morality, and competition is
immoral. Fashion is more powerful than any aesthetic, and fashion
is immoral. Glory, our ancestors would have said, is more powerful
than merit, and glory is immoral. The debauchery of signs, in every
domain, is much more powerful than reality, and the debauchery
of signs is immoral. Gambling, whose rules are immemorial, is
more powerful than work, and gambling is immoral. Seduction, in
all its forms, is more powerful than love or interest, and seduction
is immoral.

This is not, nor was it with Mandeville either, a cynical philo¬
sophical view, but an objective view of societies, and possibly of all
systems of thought. The energy itself is cynical and immoral: no
thinker who follows only the logic of his concepts has ever seen
farther than the end of his nose. You must be cynical or perish, and

Ironic Strategies / 99

this, if we may say so, is not immoral; it is the cynicism of the secret
order of things.

It is not that individuals or groups would obey some secret
instinct, but the fact remains that the powers which have attempted
to extirpate this disobedience, this debauch, this evil genie, by anni¬
hilating everything right up to the “irrational” motivations in the
mind of man, have always condemned people to a more or less slow
death. The energy of vice is irreplaceable, precisely because it is an
energy of fission and rupture, for which they have very naively
wanted to substitute a mechanical energy of production.

How do our supposedly rational and programmed societies
function? What makes them work, what makes whole populations
run? Scientific progress, “objective” information, the increase of
collective happiness, the understanding of facts and causes, the
proper punishment for the guilty, or the quality of life? Not at all:
none of this interests anyone, except in reply to public opinion polls.
What fascinates everyone is the debauchery of signs, that reality,
everywhere and always, is debauched by signs. This is the interesting
game, and this is what happens in the media, in fashion, in pub¬
licity and more generally, in the spectacle of politics, technology,
science, in the spectacle of anything at all, because the perversion of
reality, the spectacular distortion of facts and representations, the
triumph of simulation is as fascinating as catastrophe—and it is one,
in effect; it is avertiginous subversion of all effects of meaning. For
this effect of simulation, or of seduction, as you please, we are ready
to pay any price, much more than for the “real” quality of our life.

This is the secret of advertising, fashion, gambling, of all the
lewd systems that break apart moral energies and liberate immoral
energies, those that feed gaily on the signs of things alone, in defi¬
ance of their truth. In this, they go back to magical and archaic

100 / Fatal Strategies

energies which have always gambled on the omnipotence of thought
against the power of the real world, immoral energy that shatters
meaning, that traverses facts, representations, traditional values, and
electrifies societies blocked in their Platonic images.

A good example of this “diabolical” power of change, this immoral
energy of transformation, for and against all value systems, is the
United States. In spite of its morality, puritanism, obsession with
virtue, and pragmatic idealism, everything there changes irresistibly
according to an impulse that is not at all one of progress, by defini¬
tion linear—no, the true motor is the abjection of free enterprise.
Still both social and wild even today, refractory to any coherent social
project: everything there is examined, paid for, promoted and fails
according to that standard. West Coast music, therapies, sexual
“perversions,” the skyscrapers of the East, leaders, gadgets, artistic
movements, all parade by in successive waves in the same ceaseless
rhythm. And our own cultural unconscious, deeply nourished on
culture and meaning, can howl in dismay at the sign of this spec¬
tacle; the fact remains that it is there, in the immoral promiscuity of
all forms, all races, in the violent spectacle of change in which lies the
success of a society and the sign of its vitality.

Publicity, abstract, abject circulation of Eurodollars, stock
prices, immorality of fashion cycles, useless technologies of pres¬
tige, electoral parades, arms escalation, all this is not only the
historical sign of the domination of capital, but the most decisive
proof of a fact more important than capital itself: the proof that
no social project worthy of the name has ever really existed, that
in the end no group has ever really conceived itself as social, that
is to say in solidarity with its own values and coherent in its col¬
lective project, in short, there has never been even the shadow nor

Ironic Strategies / 101

the embryo of a responsible collective subject, nor even the possi¬
bility of an objective of this kind.

Public morality, collective responsibility, progress, the rationalization
of social rapports—nonsense! What group has ever dreamt of that?
Sociologists and ideologues, yes, and politicians who have lost pre¬
cisely this sense of politics, of the imposture and fallacy of politics,
which is not just the quality of Machiavelli’s Prince, but also, if you
follow Mandeville into the abysses of the social, the Machiavellian¬
ism of society in its real functioning.

The energy of the social as such, the energy of the social contract
and of its idealization in socialism, is an impoverished energy. It is a
reasonable energy, a slow and artificial energy. But one can easily see
that this isn’t what people obey; it’s only their history. Even the
Revolution, which can be seen as the culminating point of this “con¬
scious” energy, is not history’s final word on the subject. As Rivarol
says: “The people didn’t really want a Revolution, they wanted a
spectacle of it.” Is there anything more deceitful than this? More
immoral? (Especially when it’s a matter of Revolution!—but, rest
assured: when it’s a question of wanting order, the people are only
interested in the spectacle of it.)

If our perversion lies in this, that we never desire the real event,
but its spectacle, never things, but their sign, and the secret derision
of their sign, it means that we don’t really want things to change; the
change must also seduce us.

In order for Revolution to come it has to seduce us, and it can do
that only by signs—it’s in the same situation as today’s politicians
laboring for election. But you can wind up paying a very high price
for being seduced, for however meaningful Revolution can be

102 / Fatal Strategies

historically, only its spectacle is sublime. And what will we choose?
Why do people who have paid so dearly for their Revolution so
frequently, to the regret of its advocates, allow it to languish in
indifference, treating the “event” like so much bad luck, having
sacrificed their life to the spectacle of Revolution?

It is this cunning impulse that delivers us from terror.

Another example of an immoral society living off its own profound
immorality: Italy. Why isn’t Italy morose (as France is, even socialist)?

Doubtless because it is the only society to have crossed, collec-'
tively, the virtual threshold of simulation—a collective virtuosity for
living in the at once derisory and subtle order of simulation. It does
not desperately fight—and this is the reason why life there is in the
end happier—this loss of substance, value and sense which makes
others unhappy and depressed. Others live in a state of thwarted
simulation; Italy, for the most part, lives in a state of joyous simula¬
tion. There, law has already—and maybe it always has—yielded to
the game and the rules of the game. All Italians, from the Red
Brigades to the secret service, from Momma to the Mafia, from
earthquake victims to the P2 Cell (miracle of the State become
secret society!) are somehow in complicity, maintaining an ironic
connivance in the theatricality and now in the simulation of power,
law, living order or disorder—a secret pact sealing the strategy of
appearances that dominate all of this. The pact also concerns the
trompe-l’oeil effect of the political and social which comes into play
and is undone in a twitch, as well as the intense pleasure we take in
effects (here we are not far from the Renaissance model). The true
social distribution is the collective distribution of seduction.

What cement could be more fantastic than that? What could you
find, collectively or individually, beyond the fission of referential

Ironic Strategies / 103

worlds, but the fiction and ironical strategy of appearance? And it’s
not the French socialism from beyond the grave that will convince
us otherwise, for it only plays on the unhappy appearance of the
social, incarnated in the funereal statue of Commander Mitterrand
and the moral bureaucracy of his Companions.

Does not this secret disobedience of a group to its own principles,
this profound immorality and duplicity, reflect a universal order?
We need to reawaken the principle of Evil active in Manicheism
and all the great mythologies in order to affirm, against the prin¬
ciple of Good, not exactly the supremacy of Evil, but the
fundamental duplicity that demands that any order exists only to
be disobeyed, attacked, exceeded, and dismantled.

Primitive people did not see it any differently, and we know they
had a vision of their gods much different from our own: they
invented them only to put them to death, and drew their energy
from this intermittent sacrifice. With the Aztecs, the gods sacrifice
themselves one by one in order to give birth to the sun, the moon,
the people. In order for something to come alive the god who
incarnates it has to die.

That is the basic rule: for a group or an individual to live, it can
never aim at its own good, its own interest, its own ideal. It always
has to aim elsewhere, to the side, beyond, off center, like the com¬
batant in the Japanese martial arts. It is useless to attempt to
reconcile these two principles. Duplicity is strategic and fatal.

This is exactly what Bataille saw with his concept of expendi¬
ture and accursed shares. It is precisely the superfluous, the
excessive that is essential. It’s there that all the stakes converge,
where the energy of a society is fomented. The social is thus no

104 / Fatal Strategies

longer a contractual organization for the management of a group’s
interest (which, then, would only be the management of misery,
including and especially the penury of the social itself—the princi¬
ple of economics begins with the fact that there’s never enough for
everyone, Bataille’s principle with the fact that there’s always too
much for everyone, and that excess is our destiny), but rather a
risky, precarious organization, possibly even absurd, a project of
devastating energy, an antieconomy, a prodigy, a challenge to
conservative nature. The social is a luxury; our own merely charac¬
terizes the poverty of our societies.

Another encouraging sign: the extraordinary collective fascina¬
tion and passion of a people to sacrifice or to see sacrificed its chief,
when the occasion offers itself. We should not underestimate this
properly political passion for empowering men or castes whom
people then continually watch collapse or whom they themselves
hasten to their end.

This is only the political version of the law of reversibility and
a form of political intelligence at least equal, if not superior, to that
of the social contract and delegation of power, which it exalts only
to deny. Of course people choose leaders and obey them, of course
they invest their representatives with power and legitimacy. But can
we suppose that there doesn’t always remain the logical necessity to
take vengeance on them? Power, whatever it is and wherever it
comes from, is a symbolic murder and it must be expiated by
murder. We may also be sure that every society is perfectly cog¬
nizant of this, at the very moment when it puts someone in power
and this someone, if he is intelligent, is perfectly conscious of it as
well. This goes back to the rule of the game which says that a group
or an individual should never aim at its own preservation. Neither
should power, if it really wants to be effective in its exercise, aim at

Ironic Strategies / 105

its own continuity: it should somehow desire its own death. Lacking
which it falls into the illusion of power, in the ridiculousness of
perpetual engendering, and perpetual ceding of power. If it doesn’t
understand this it will be swept away. If the group doesn’t under¬
stand it, it will itself be lost. The institution of power is based on
the equal necessity of its dissolution.

Even modern leaders, although obsessed with their permanence
and not given to ritual sacrifice, sense this rule and do not hesitate
to stage their demise and death through assassination attempts that
are more or less orchestrated. Certain of them, moreover, do not
always escape unharmed, but that is not the important thing, for in
this case, too, merely dying is of no use, you have to know how to
fade and pass away. And the property of modern systems, bureau¬
cratic or administrative, is no longer knowing how to die, no longer
knowing how to do anything but succeed themselves. Today’s
leaders believe in their virtue because they believe in designation by
the people. They have only banal strategies of power. But other
politicians have always known that power is never this unilateral
ability of disposing of another’s will, but always the subtle and
ambiguous orchestration of its own disappearance. They know that
power, like truth, is the empty place you must know how never to
occupy, but that you must know how to produce so that others will
be swallowed up in it. On the other hand, power that insists on
occupying this place, power that incarnates power, is obscene and
impure, and sooner or later it collapses, amidst blood and ridicule.

Furthermore, a strategy of intelligent subversion would also be
to avoid aiming directly at power, but rather to force it into occu-
pying this obscene position of absolute obviousness. For it is there
that, mistaking itself for real, it falls into the imaginary—it’s there
that it no longer exists except to violate its own secret.

106 / Fatal Strategies

This was the nonconcerted tactic of May ’68: to force power to
coincide with its own nonsimulated exercise—precisely through
multiple decoys—and to make power appear as repressive, an
apparently naive and useless objective.

What’s the use of sacrificing oneself to prove this? But there lay
the trap: forcing it to be more repressive than it was in reality. The
demonstrators thus in truth exercised a power of simulation, by
obliging power to add to repression the obscenity of repression. And
that is what kills: simulation is always the most effective weapon. Its
enough to annihilate yourself in front of what opposes you to oblige
that force to turn against itself with all the power of its inertia. May
’68 therefore was not an offensive action (power would win that
battle hands down), but a defensive simulation, which is to rob
power of its own secret (precisely that it doesn’t exist) and so to
leave it defenseless before its own enormity.

We should remember that power revolves around a secret
monstrosity, and that to elevate someone to power is to plunge
that person into the difficult exercise, always on the verge of
ridiculousness, of privilege without any counterpart. He can
manage the situation only through ambiguity and duplicity. If
you end all uncertainty in the exercise of his rule you condemn
him absolutely.

The very principle of Evil is in objective irony and in the strategies
that emanate from it.

All epochs, philosophies, and metaphysics have formulated at
some moment (manicheans, heretics, cathars, witches, but also
Nervalians, Jarryites, Lautreamontists) the hypothesis of the deri¬
siveness and the fundamental unreality of the world, that is to say,

Ironic Strategies / 107

really of a Principle of Evil, and they have always been persecuted
and burned for this, the ultimate sin.

The unreality of the world and its corollary, the omnipotence
of thought, were rigorously conceived only by societies that were
missing the real (rather than by societies without history or writing).
All mythologies, all dawning religions have lived by a violent denial
of the real, a violent defiance of existence. And all that denies and
defies the real is certainly the closer for it to making a world out of
thought alone.

We’ve made irony a Mephistophelian form, but it is only what
filters all things and saves them from confusion. It filters words,
spirits, bodies, concepts, and pleasures and protects them from
amorous promiscuity or coagulation. It plays from one form to
another, in anamorphosis, and it plays from one species to another,
in metamorphosis—and thus the copulation of humans and gods in
the Greek myths is ironic. The difference between gods and humans,
and between humans and beasts, is a seductive philter. When like
couple with like, everything becomes obscene. The necessity of irony,
like that of pleasure, is part of the necessity of Evil.

The Evil Genie of the Object

By the beginning of the twentieth century science recognized that
any means of microscopic observation provokes such an alteration in
the object that knowledge of it becomes imperiled. This is already a
revolution because the conventional hypothesis of an objective
reality and science is thereby abandoned, but the principle of exper¬
imentation itself was left intact. What was at stake was only certainty,
and what was established in its place was a new convention, that of

108 / Fatal Strategies

uncertainty. The results became relative to the functioning of sci¬
ence itself as a medium—but this relativization somehow testifies to
a supreme pride: “My certainty stops at the reading of the instru¬
ments,” says a microphysicist. Or again: “Is the plate on which this
particle of light stops not in fact its ‘cause’? Can we really speak of
the photon before (or after) having captured it on a screen or pho¬
tographic plate?” In the human sciences the equivalent, intuited but
never analyzed for its ultimate consequences, is the presupposition
and induction of any possible response by the question itself, and
therefore the vanity of analysis and interpretation (many, of course,
are not bothered by such scruples).

This is, however, only a limited revolution, in the sense that
no other hypothesis is entertained than that of an altered object,
submitted to the violence of the means of observation without the
possibility of response (except by attributing this to the insoluble
problem of our inability, like Orpheus’ Eurydice, to summon an
object without making it disappear), or else an object condemned
to total simulation, that is to say, projected into the aleatory form
of models.

The hypothesis is never entertained, beyond an object’s being
distorted, of its active reply to the fact of being questioned,
solicited, violated.

Perhaps unhappy with being alienated by observation, the object
is fooling us? Perhaps it’s inverting its own answers, and not only
those that are solicited? Possibly it has no desire at all to be analyzed
and observed, and taking this process for a challenge (which it is) it’s
answering with a challenge. We sense this victorious ruse of the ana¬
lyzed object very definitely in the so-called human sciences (when we
prefer not to forget it). There we can already register a point of no
return, where not only every position of the analytical subject is

Ironic Strategies / 109

stricken with relativity and uncertainty, but where supremacy is
completely inverted: today the analyzed object triumphs every¬
where, by its very position as object, over the subject of analysis. It
escapes the analyst everywhere, pushing him back to his indeter¬
minable position of subject. By its complexity it not only overflows,
but also annuls the questions that the other can ask of it. In the
reversibility even natural processes baffle all solicitation (reversibility
is the absolute weapon against the determination, of whatever kind,
that one tries to impose on phenomena, but it does not spare inde¬
terminacy, either, for reversibility is not a matter of chance, but
would rather be a kind of perfectly inverted and simultaneous deter¬
mination, or perverse counter determination). Pushed into retreat
by analysis, the objects become reversible, just like appearance;
pushed into retreat by meaning, they metamorphose. The subject of
analysis has become fragile everywhere, and this revenge of the
object has only just begun. It is itself part of a general reversibility.

Worse: perhaps the subject will see itself one day seduced by its
object (which is quite natural), and it will become once more the
prey of appearance—which is by far the best thing that can happen
to it, to it and to science.

This kind of reversibility, this turning of knowledge into an
enigmatic duel between the subject and the object, this form
readable, until the present, in the sphere of language: physicists
themselves sense it at the limits of the “exact sciences” of matter.

Measurements made on a particle do not allow us to say what
would happen with another particle produced under the same condi¬
tions. A measurement made on a particle, a photon for example,
disturbs the experimental apparatus to such a degree that another par¬
ticle separated from the first by an infinite distance, equal on our scale
to several light years, instantly produces an echo of this movement.

110/ Fatal Strategies

“A measurement propagates its long-range effects at a speed
greater than that of light. The photons awaken each other, send
information back to the light source, and think up ways to avoid the
disturbance caused by the system of observation. The photons com¬
municate: it’s fantastic. And to do so it seems that they employ
instantaneous interactions at a distance—beyond the limit of the
speed of light. Energy coming from the future could modify the
present state of the system.”

How to resist the faster-than-light irony of these photons with
their ultra-rapid secret service, defying any analytic apparatus? At all
events this hypothesis of an active and refractory response of a non¬
inertia of “matter,” an irreducible antagonism, and to tell it like it is,
a duel-to-the-death between the subject, whoever he may be, as he
has been hypostatized in analysis, and the object, whatever it might
be, which this subject claims to subordinate to his calculations and
manipulations—this hypothesis is fascinating. When you think
about it, it is fantastically obvious. It is the (“scientific”) hypothesis
of the dead objectivity of the universe that is implausible. If one
wishes to be a materialist, one should by no means attribute to
matter this inertia and passivity, but instead a genie, even an evil
one, able to undo all attempts to subjugate him.

Until now reversibility has in effect remained metaphysical. (“If the
universe can be explained as an effect of a cause, it is naturally
because cause and effect cannot be considered as equivalent and
interchangeable terms. Just as a mixture of water and ink cannot in
the end be redivided into two distinct liquids... every physical phe¬
nomenon remains subordinate to the irreversibility of the chain of
cause and effect.”) But it may now be in the process of disturbing
the physical order and shaking it to its very foundations.

Ironic Strategies /111

With it disappears the rational principle that prevents the effect
from turning back on the cause to cancel it out; it prevents the effect
from being the cancellation of the cause or prevents there never
having been causes, but a pure and simple chain of effects.
Reversibility kills any determinist (or indeterminist) principle of
causality in ovum, in the egg. And when I say “in the egg” I mean
it in the sense of the riddle of the chicken and the egg—which
comes first?—the famous aporia of causal linkage; even the causal
order does not escape parodic circularity, which is somehow the
revenge of the reversible order.

Stories of reversibility are always the funniest, like the one about
the rat and the psychologist: the rat tells about how he ended up by
perfectly conditioning the psychologist to give him a piece of bread
every time he lifted the gate of his cage. Based on this story you
could imagine, on the level of scientific observation, that the exper¬
iment would have been faked—not involuntarily altered by the
observer, but faked by the object, with the purpose of amusement
or vengeance (as in the unintelligible trajectories of particles), or
better yet: that the object only pretends to obey the laws of physics
because it gives so much pleasure to the observer.

Such would be the pataphysics (the science of imaginary solu¬
tions) that lies in wait for all physics at its inadmissible limits.

Anticipate the desire of the other, reflect his demand like a mirror,
satisfy it in advance: we can scarcely imagine what power of decep¬
tion and absorption, entrapment and diversion—in a word, of
subtle revenge—there is in this instantaneous seduction. Likewise
the manner in which the masses become blurred as reality on the
horizon of simulated systems of capture, such as polls or the photo¬
graphic plates for particles; or else, the way these selfsame events

112/ Fatal Strategies

hide behind the screen of media and television. For it is true that
events, like particles, have no probable existence beyond the
deflecting screen—no longer a reflecting one, like a mirror. The
mirror was the place of imaginary reproduction of the subject, the
screen (by which I mean networks, circuits, perforated tape, mag¬
netic tape, simulation models, all systems of recording and control,
all the surfaces of inscription) is rightfully the place of its disap¬
pearance. The light from a television, it has been pointed out, is
endogenous; it comes from within and reflects nothing. Everything
happens entirely as if the screen itself were the cause and origin of
the phenomena that appear there, so serious are the consequences of
the current sophistication of the systems of “objective” capture that
they have annihilated the very objectivity of their processes.

The other, the object, disappears on the horizons of science. The
event, the meaning, disappears on the horizons of the media.

But one may see that the disappearance itself can also be a strat¬
egy—not a necessary consequence of the information system, but a
strategy proper to the object, for which the monitor’s screen would
serve somehow as a screen of disappearance.

To this cathodic recording surface the individual or the masses
reply by a parodic behavior of disappearance. What are they, and
what do they do behind this screen? They make themselves into an
impenetrable and unintelligible surface, which is a way of fading.
They eclipse themselves, they melt into the shallow screen, in such a
way that their reality, like that of particles of matter, can be radically
cast into doubt without affecting the probabilistic analysis of their
behavior. In “reality,” behind this “objective” fortification of net¬
works and models which think they capture them, and where a
whole population of investigators, analysts, scientists, observers (as
well as mediaticians and politicians) is in motion, there passes a

Ironic Strategies / 113

whole wave of derision, reversion, and parody which is the active
exploitation, the parodic set-up by the object itself of its own
method of disappearance!

The media make the event, the object, the referent, disappear.
But perhaps they only serve as support for a strategy of disappear¬
ance which would be that of the object itself?

The masses destroy and eclipse the individual. But perhaps for the
individual they represent the long dreamed of occasion to disappear?

The media provide no response. But perhaps they are only the sur¬
face which the masses take advantage of to remain silent?

It might still be a matter of seduction, but exactly of the oppo¬
site kind—no longer the subversion of the masses by the media, but
instead the subversion of the media by the masses, in their strategy
of disappearance on the horizon of the media.

Just as the observation of a particle under given conditions does
not allow us to draw any conclusions as to the behavior of another
particle under these same conditions, so everything happens as if
individuals and masses only comply so well with analytical models
and polls to make them more indeterminate. Polls are indetermi-
nite; this is their charm, so to speak, and they are charming because
they are screens behind which the object has disappeared to such a
degree that we can no longer make decisive statements about its
causal existence, nor about the effective consequences of the mod¬
els. This results in a justified suspicion or a general casualness
regarding the value of polls, a kind of spontaneous “verdict of sim¬
ulation,” a verdict of incredulity and mistrust, which today extends
to everything that is delivered to us via the media and information,
and even science. We record everything, but we don’t believe it,
because we have become screens ourselves, and who can ask of a

114/ Fatal Strategies

screen to believe what it records? To simulation we reply by simu¬
lation; we have ourselves become systems of simulation. There are
people today (the polls tell us so!) who don’t even believe in the
space shuttle. Here it is no longer a matter of philosophical doubt
as to being and appearance, but a profound indifference to the
reality principle as an effect of the loss of all illusion. All the old
structures of knowledge, the concept, the scene, the mirror,
attempt to create illusions, and thus they emphasize a truthful
projection of the world. Electronic surfaces, on the other hand, are
without illusion; they offer only the inconclusive.

It is this that makes good old critical and ironical judgement no
longer possible. We used to be able to say about something, in
order to unmask its rhetoric: “It’s only literature!”; to reveal its arti¬
ficiality: “It’s only theatre!”; to denounce its mystification: “It’s only
a movie!” But we cannot say, in order to denounce anything: “It’s
only TV!” Because there is no longer a universe of reference.
Because illusion is dead or because it is total. The day we will be
able to say: “It’s only TV! It’s only information!” will be the day
when everything will have changed.

Perhaps it will be when we have had more experiences like that of
Capricorn One., where an exhibition to Mars, essential to American
prestige, and prevented at the last moment, is instead wholly staged
in TV studios in the desert, with simultaneous, life-like retransmis¬
sion on screens all over the world. Why not? Simulation is no crime.
Credibility is only a special effect, and even space, cosmic space, is
for us only a shallow screen. Spatial effect becomes special effect.

A screen, whether TV or survey, represents nothing. It’s a mistake to
think that polls can be representative of anything at all, as a word can
be of a thing, an image of a reality, or a face of inner feelings. The

Ironic Strategies / 115

electoral system can still claim that it is representative, because it
stages a relative dialectic of representatives and the represented. But
this isn’t the case here. The model, unlike the concept, is not of the
order of representation, but of simulation (virtual, aleatory, dissua¬
sive and nonreferential), and it is a total misunderstanding to apply
to it the logic of a representative system. From this arise all the mis¬
understandings and the unending useless polemics on their worth
and “good use” (as in the ad: Seguela / Mitterrand: Who has brought
in socialism?) Absurd and insoluble: there is a confusion of two
heterogeneous systems whose postulates cannot be translated from
one into the other. An illogical projection of an operational, statisti¬
cal, international simulatory system on a traditional value system, on
a system of representation, will and opinion. The misunderstanding
is enough to crystallize an entire moral philosophy of information.

However you perfect them, polls will never represent anything,
because the rule of their game is representation. Their logic is per¬
fectly attuned to objectivity, but at the end of the process there is
no object: this is therefore objectivity in its pure state. Marvelous
mockery! This is true for all of the media: when you’re in simula¬
tion, that is, in the neither true nor false, all moral science is
perfectly hypocritical. It is equally implausible to speak of an ethics
of polls (or of the media) as of an ethics of fashion—impossible to
find as soon as the domain of style is no longer to play on an oppo¬
sition between beautiful and ugly, but on the indistinguishability
of the two and the undifferentiatied whirling of the two in a
generalized effect of seduction.

Furthermore, even supposing that one could perfect polls to
the point of total reliability and could credit the information with
some degree of truth, that would be the beginning of the drama.

116/ Fatal Strategies

For this ideal snapshot that you would obtain from the social
would amount to absolving us from its dramatic feasibility. This
truth would mean that the social had been vanquished by the
technique of the social. Which, in fact, is exactly the diabolical
objective of all simulation. It is there that the soft technology of
extermination begins. This is why the real problem begins with the
hypothesis of effective functioning, for what is critical is not the
distortions of truth inside the machine, but the distortion of every¬
thing real by the objective reliability of this machine.

How sweet was information in the days of truth! How sweet
was science in the days of the real! How sweet was objectivity in
the time of the object! How sweet was alienation in the days of
the subject! Etc.

We should therefore believe neither those who exalt the
beneficial use of the media nor those who complain about manip¬
ulation, for the simple reason that there is nothing in common
between a system of meaning and a system of simulation. Adver¬
tising and polls are quite incapable of alienating the will or the
opinion of anyone, for the simple reason that they don’t operate in
this space-time of will and representation where judgement is
formed. For the same reason it’s quite impossible for them to shed
any light on anyone’s will or opinion, since they are foreign to the
scene of opinion, at once theatrical and representative, that consti¬
tuted the very scene of politics. So we may rest assured that they
cannot possibly destroy this scene. But let us not have any illusions
about them either: they have nothing to teach us.

It’s this dehiscence or hiatus between the two systems that today
plunges us collectively into a state of hebetude and uncertainty as to
our own will to choice, opinion, and judgment. We will never know
if an advertisement or a public Opinion poll has really influenced

Ironic Strategies / 117

anyone’s will or not, but we will never know what would have
happened if there had been no advertising or surveys, either. The
screen that media (information) weaves around us is a screen of total
uncertainty. And of totally new uncertainty—since it is no longer
the kind that results from a lack of information, but one that comes
from information itself, from an excess of information. Unlike
traditional uncertainty, which could always be resolved, this one is
irreparable and, therefore, will never be lifted.

Such is our destiny as the polled, the informed, the measured:
confronted with the anticipated verification of our behavior,
absorbed by this permanent refraction, we are never again con¬
fronted with our own will or with that of the other. We are no
longer even alienated, for there is no more other; the scene of the
other, like that of the social and political, has disappeared. Each
individual is forced into the undivided coherence of statistics.
Extraversion without appeal, like uncertainty.

The obscenity proper to polls comes not from their betrayal of
the secret of an opinion, the intimacy of a desire, or from the viola¬
tion of some imprescriptable right of the private person (if there really
was a secret, no one, not even its keeper, would be able to betray it),
but from statistical exhibitionism, from this continual voyeurism of
the group spying on itself. At every moment it must know what it
wants, what it thinks, it must see itself in numbers on the video
screen, decipher its temperature curves, in a sort of hypochondriacal
mania—the social is obsessed with itself, it becomes its own vice, its
own perversion. Overinformed, it becomes obese with itself.

The masses also are made of this useless gluttony of information
that claims to enlighten when it only encumbers space and cancels
itself out in silent equivalence.

118/ Fatal Strategies

No one can do anything about this circularity of the masses and
information. The two phenomena fit each other: the masses have no
opinions, nor does information inform them: one and the other
continue monstrously to feed each other the speed of the rotation of
information increasing the weight of the masses, but not at all their
level of consciousness.

All of this would be dramatic if there was an objective truth of
needs, an objective truth of public opinion. The influence of adver¬
tising, polls, media, information (the pollution of the pollution of
consciousness), all this would be dramatic if we were certain that
there existed a human nature and social essence somewhere with
their own values and will. For that would pose the eternal problem
of alienation.

We need to go even farther and revise all utopias tied to information
theory. Things have gone very rapidly since the beginning of the
century. Today it is information itself, the excess of information that
is pushing us along the road of a general involution.

Today knowledge about an event is only the degraded form of
this event. A lower form of the energy of the event. Likewise knowl¬
edge about opinion is only a degraded form of this opinion.

When knowledge, through its models, anticipates the event, in
other words, when the event (or opinion) is preceded by its degraded
form (or its simulated form) its energy is entirely absorbed into
the void.

The total predictability of the universe, such as the one science
aspires to, constitutes in this sense the most degraded form of the
universe. Could it be that the counter finality of science and
information is in a position to forestall the end of the world by a

Ironic Strategies /119

systematic though unconscious degradation, purposely lost in an
inverted utopia, that of saving the world through information
(though there seem also to have surfaced some flickerings of bad
conscience)?

Assembling the maximum amount of information on the uni¬
verse can put an end to the world. As in the fable of the nine billion
names of God: when, thanks to the computer, we’ve been able to
decline them all, the world will end, and the stars will go out.

Information would thus be the only way of putting an end to
the universe, which would never run down by itself.

But there is perhaps another, more joyous way of seeing things, and
of finally substituting for eternally critical theory an ironic theory.

If in fact you consider the inconclusiveness of polls, the uncer¬
tainty of their effects, close to divinatory meteorology, if you
consider that they say whatever they want, that everyone already
knows it, doesn’t believe, does nothing with them (but always
demands ever more of them), their capability of simultaneously
validating contradictory tendencies, or, when the results are
unacceptable, piously falsifying their objectivity (as with polls on
the death penalty and immigration), but especially the perpetual
denial we oppose to them, even and particularly if they “verify” our
behavior—no one accepts being “verified,” nor coinciding with his
probabilities, and no one can live in the anticipated image of what
he is, nor in the exorbitant mirror of his statistical truth. (An
amusing example of this stubborn denial of statistical chance in the
very act of its application: “if it makes you feel safer, the Paris
Underground Transport Authority has calculated that if fifty people
take the subway twice a day for sixty years only one will be attacked.
There is no reason it should be you!”). Just as the gambler doesn’t

120 / Fatal Strategies

believe in chance but only in Luck (with a capital letter: Grace, not
probability), likewise no one gives up on destiny; this is why no one
believes in statistics.

At all events the greatness of statistics is not in their objectivity
but in their involuntary humor.

And that’s how one has to take things, in terms of their humor. To
the basic casualness with which the polls treat the social and social
phenomena corresponds a similar casualness in their reading and
use. And to the seriousness with which they claim to treat the social
there is a reply by way of the ferocious irony of their very failure and
of all those aleatory distortions. There is something like a humorous
providence that sees to the derailing of this all too smoothly running
machine, and that arranges for it to trap itself in the mirror of objec¬
tivity. A sort of absolute weapon emerges from the depths of the
social (?), that of a radical dissimulation in response to the simula¬
tion of response staged by polls and statistics. This is what one could
call the evil genie of the object, the evil genie of the masses, eternally
blocking the truth of the social and its analyses.

The object is never innocent, it exists and takes revenge. The
flawed refraction of the luminous ray of information on the “matter”
of the social is neither an accident nor an imperfection in the system,
it comes from the genie of the object, from an offensive resistance of
the social to its investigation, and which takes the form of an occult
duel between master pollsters and the polled, between the masses
and the political class, etc. In this duel all the naivete comes from the
side of the manipulators, for whom it is assumed that one can at all
events oblige the object to deliver its truth for its own good. If it
doesn’t understand the questions, if it answers incorrectly, if it
answers too well, if it asks questions itself, it is understood that this

Ironic Strategies /121

is only a form of maladjustment to the analytical set-up. Science,
through some fantastic aberration, believes itself always assured of
the complicity of its object. It underestimates its vices, derision,
nonchalance, false complicity, anything that could make the process
ironic, anything that feeds the original strategy, which may even be
victorious, of the object as opposed to that of the subject.

If you understand the polls in this sense, you see that they
achieve exactly the opposite effects of their stated objective. They
function as a spectacle of information (information is like revolu¬
tion: people care only for its spectacle), therefore as a mockery of
information and of the political class.

The involuntary humor of polls (and the sly pleasure that we
take in this “scientific” phantasmagoria) comes from the fact that
they erase all political credibility.

Who are these people who need polls in order to decide, for
whom testing takes the place of strategy? They are dispossessed of
any initiative, and caught in the trap of the medium to which they
entrust their power. All media conceal this dazzling trap: they anni¬
hilate the political function of a society and thus satisfy the ironic
unconscious of the masses, whose deep instinct remains the sym¬
bolic murder of the political class.

The people, who have always served as alibi for the representa¬
tive system, indemnified itself by allowing itself the spectacle of a
political scene. Today it takes revenge through the spectacle of its
own disappearance. We think we re polling it, while day after day it
enjoys the home movies of the fluctuations of its own opinion in its
reading of the polls.

It is only in one sense that the people believe in polls, that we
all believe in them, as a game of predicting an evil outcome, a bet of
double or nothing on a gaming table. A game of the equal finality

122 / Fatal Strategies

of all tendencies, effects of truth, and of the circularity of questions
and answers, etc. Are we perhaps all thereby inaugurating a collec¬
tive form of ironic existence that, in its great wisdom, no longer
questions its own grounds and can only accept its own capture in
the spectacle of its disappearance?

The best example of this is the masses. They are not at all an object
of oppression and manipulation. The masses do not have to be
liberated and, in any case, they cannot be. All their (transpolitical)
power is in being there as pure object—that is to say, in opposing
their silence and their absence of desire against any political wish
to make them speak. Everyone tries to seduce, solicit, invest them.
Atonal, amorphous, abysmal, they exercise a passive and opaque
sovereignty; they say nothing, but subtly, perhaps like animals in
their brute indifference (although the masses are “essentially”
rather hormonic or endocrinic—that is, antibodies), they neutralize
the whole political scene and discourse. If these seem today so
empty, if no stakes, no project can still mobilize a political scene
that remains committed to artificial theatrics and the effects of
useless powers this is due to the massive obscenity of this enor¬
mous silent antibody and to the retractility of this unnameable
“thing” that has the absurd bestial power of suction and absorp¬
tion of the monsters of science fiction: which in effect feeds its
inertia on all the accelerating energy of the system with the myriad
pieces of information that the system secretes to try to exorcize
this inertia and absence.

Nothing can be done about it. The masses are pure object, that
which has vanished from the horizon of the subject, that which
has disappeared from the horizon of history—just as silence is the

Ironic Strategies / 123

pure object that disappears from the horizon of the word, and the
secret is the pure object that disappears every day from the horizon
of meaning.

The stupefying power of the mass-as-object. The masses incar¬
nate the pure object of the political, that is to say, the ideal of an
absolute power, a power of death over the social body, they are the
incarnation of a terrifying dream of power—and at the same time
they are its empty object, its null and void materialization, the radical
antibody, inaccessible to all political subjectivity and therefore
perfectly useless and dangerous. The political scenario is reversed:
its no longer power that pulls the masses in its wake; its the masses
that drag power down to its fall. Likewise, political men, in the
mood, as it were, for seducing the masses, would do well to ask
themselves if they are not going to be cannibalized in return and if
they won’t have to pay for their simulacrum of power by being
devoured, like the male by the female after copulation.

Anything that was once constituted as an object by a subject
represents for the latter a virtual death threat. No more than the
slave accepts his servitude does the object accept its compulsory
objectivity. The subject can attain only an imaginary mastery of it,
ephemeral at all events, but will not escape this insurrection of the
object—a silent revolution, but the only one left now.

This revolution will not be symbolic, dazzling, and subjective,
but obscure and ironic. It won’t be dialectical, it will be fatal.
Against the seduction of every object stripped of its sense, against
the possibility for any object to be an object of seduction and dread,
any strategy will be a good one.

All information, the incessant activity of the media, the mass of
messages, aims only at conjuring away this mortal contamination.

124 / Fatal Strategies

Informational, “mediatic,” communicated energy is expended today
only for the purpose of tearing a bit of sense, a bit of life from the
cold and indifferent antibody, from this silent mass whose attraction
grows ever greater. We need to coalesce all the centrifugal forces to
escape from this force of inertia. From now on, information can at
bottom have no other meaning than this.

There is and always will be a major difficulty in analyzing media
and the sphere of information through the traditional categories of
the philosophy of the subject: will, representation, choice, liberty,
knowledge and desire. For it is obvious that they are absolutely
contradicted there and that the subject is totally alienated in its
sovereignty. There’s a basic contradiction between this sphere, that
of information, and the moral law that still masters us and that says:
Thou shaft know thy will and desire. Looking at it this way, neither
the media nor technology and science teach us anything; rather they
have pushed back the limits of will and representation, shuffled the
cards and taken from each subject the disposition of his own body,
his desire and his own choice and liberty.

But this idea of alienation was never more than an ideal perspective
of philosophy for the use of the hypothetical masses. It never
expressed anything but the alienation of the philosopher himself,
that is, of one who thinks he is other. Hegel is very clear about this
in his judgement on the Aufklarer ,* on the Enlightenment philoso¬
pher who denounces the “reign of error” and scorns it.

It’s enough to reverse this idea—the masses alienated by the
media—to appreciate how much the whole media universe, possi¬
bly even the entire technical world, results from a secret strategy
of the supposedly alienated masses, from a secret form of denial of
will, from an involuntary challenge to all that was asked of the

Ironic Strategies / 125

subject by philosophy and morals, that is, a challenge to any exer¬
cise of will, knowledge, or liberty.

This would be no longer a matter of revolution but of a massive
devolution , of a massive delegation of power and responsibility either
to political and intellectual systems or technical and operational
ones. Massive de-volition and withdrawal of the will. Not by way of
alienation or voluntary servitude (the mystery of which remains total
since Boethius, as soon as the problem is posed in terms of the sub¬
ject’s consent to his own slavery, in terms of renunciation of the
subject of his own being; but does he really have one?)—but by
another sovereign philosophy of the involuntary, of the “un-will,” by
a kind of antimetaphysics whose secret is that the masses (or Man)
know with certainty that they don’t need to pass judgment on them¬
selves or on the world, that they don’t have to will, know, or desire.
The deepest wish is perhaps the wish to hand one’s desire over to
another. A strategy of disillusion with their “own” desire, disillusion
with their own will, a strategy of ironical investment, of expulsion
toward others of philosophical, moral and political injunction.

That’s what the professionals are there for, the tenants and
lieutenants of the concept and of desire. All of advertising and infor¬
mation, all of the entire political class are there to tell us what we
want, to tell the masses what they want—and we basically assume
this massive transfer of responsibility with joy, because it is simply
neither obvious, nor of great interest to know, to will, to have facul¬
ties or desires. Who has imposed these upon us but the philosophers?

Choice is an ignoble imperative. Any philosophy that assigns
man the exercise of his will can only plunge him into despair. For if,
on the one hand, nothing is more flattering for consciousness than
to know what it wants, on the other hand, nothing is more seduc¬
tive for the other consciousness (the unconscious?), that obscure

126 / Fatal Strategies

and vital one which makes happiness depend on the despair of the
will, than not to know what it wants, to be at the same time deliv¬
ered from choice and diverted from its own objective will. It makes
more sense to give in to some insignificant whim than to be sus¬
pended on your own will or on the necessity of choosing. Brummel
had a servant for that. Before a splendid landscape constellated with
lakes, he turns to his valet to ask: “Which lake do I prefer?”

Not only do people surely not want to be told what they want,
but they don’t even want to know it, and it’s not even certain that
they want to want. Faced with such a solicitation, it is their evil
genie that whispers in their ear to leave it to the advertising or infor¬
mation systems to “persuade” them, to make a choice for them (or
to leave to politicians the job of making things better), just like
Brummel with his servant.... So who is being trapped?

The masses know that they know nothing and they have no desire
to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want
power. We reproach them vigorously for these signs of stupidity and
passivity. But they’re not that at all: the masses are very snobbish;
they act like Brummel and sovereignly delegate the faculty of choice
to someone else, in a sort of game of irresponsibility, ironic chal¬
lenge, sovereign lack of will, or secret ruse. All mediators (political,
intellectual, heirs to the philosophers of the Enlightenment in their
contempt of the masses) are only good basically for this: to admin¬
ister by delegation, by proxy, this tedious business of power and will,
to relieve the masses of this transendence for their greater pleasure,
and then to reward them with the spectacle of it. Vicarious*, to
recall Veblen’s concept, the status of these “privileged” classes, whose
will would have been diverted, without their realizing it, toward the
secret finalities of the very masses they despise.

Ironic Strategies / 127

We live all of this, subjectively, in a paradoxical mode, since these
masses coexist in us with the intelligent and voluntary being who con¬
demns and scorns them. No one knows what the true opposite of
consciousness is—unless it be this unconscious of repression that psy¬
choanalysis has imposed upon us. But perhaps our true unconscious
is in this ironic power of withdrawal, of nondesire, nonknowledge,
silence, absorption then expulsion of all powers, wills, of all enlight¬
enment and depths of meaning, because of an insistance which is
thereby bathed in the light of a ridiculous looking halo. Our uncon¬
scious might not be composed of desires properly sworn to the sad
destiny of repression. It might not even be repressed at all. It would
instead be made up out of what’s left after this joyous expulsion of
all encumbering superstructures of being and will.

We always had a sad vision of the masses (alienated), a sad vision
of the unconscious (repressed). Upon our entire philosophy lies the
heavy weight of these sad correlations. If only for the sake of change,
it would be interesting to conceive of the masses, the object-masses,
as possessing a delusive, illusive, allusive strategy, corresponding to
an unconscious that is finally ironic, joyous and seductive.

The Evil Genie of Passion

About love you can say anything, but you don’t know what to say.
Love exists, and that’s about it. You love your mother, God, nature,
a woman, little birds and flowers: the term, become the leitmotif of
our deeply sentimental culture, is the most strongly emotional one
in our language, but also the most diffuse, vague, and unintelligible.
Compared to the crystalline state of seduction, love is a liquid,
even a gaseous solution. Everything is soluble in love, by love. The

128 / Fatal Strategies

resolution, the dissolution of all things into a passionate harmony
or a subconjugal libido, love is a kind of universal answer, the hope
of an ideal conviviality, the virtuality of a world of relations in
fusion. Hate separates; love unites. Eros is what binds, couples,
conjugates, foments associations, projections, identifications. “Love
one another.” Who ever could have said: “Seduce one another”?

I prefer the form of seduction, which maintains the hypothesis
of an enigmatic duel, of a violent solicitation or attraction, which is
a form not of response, but of challenge, of a secret distance and
perpetual antagonism that allows the playing out of a rule—I prefer
this form and its pathos of distance to that of love and its pathetic
rapprochment. I prefer the dual form of seduction to the universal
form of love. (Heraclitus: it is the antagonism of elements, beings
and gods which comprises the game of becoming, not a universal
solvent, or an amorous con-fusion—here the gods affront and
seduce each other; and love, when it comes along with Christianity
as the principle of creation, will put an end to this great game.)

It is possible to speak of seduction because it is a dual and intel¬
ligible form, while love is a universal and unintelligible one. It may
be even that only seduction is truly a form, while love is only the
diffuse metaphor of the fall of beings into individuation and the
compensatory invention of a universal energy that would incline
these beings to each other. By what providential effect, by what
miracle of will, by what stroke of theatre would beings have been
destined to love one another, by what crazy imagination could one
conceive that “I love you,” that people love each other, that we love
each other? Here we are dealing with the wildest projection of a uni¬
versal principle of attraction and equilibrium, pure phantasmagoria.
Subjective phantasmagoria, modern passion par excellence.

Ironic Strategies / 129

Where there is no longer game or rule, a law and affect must be
invented, a mode of universal effusion, a form of salvation to over¬
come the separation of souls and bodies, to put an end to hatred,
predestination, discrimination, fate: this is our gospel of sentimen¬
tality, putting an end to seduction as fate.

This elevation of love to the highest level of divine right, to an
ethical form of universal fulfillment (love still serves everywhere as
moral justification for happiness), has thrown seduction into a
vaguely immoral, vaguely perverse zone, a form of playing prelimi¬
nary to love. Love remains the only serious or sublime finality, the
only possible absolution for an impossible universe. Any concern
with providing seduction with other titles of nobility runs up against
mechanisms of sublimation and idealization which are those of love.

Seduction is linked not to affects but to the fragility of appear¬
ance; it has no model and seeks no form of salvation—it is
therefore immoral. It obeys no morality of exchange; it is based
rather on the pact, the challenge and the alliance, which are not
universal and natural forms, but artificial and initiatory ones. It is
therefore frankly perverse.

The matter is complicated further by the play of terminology. Nei¬
ther seduction nor love being precise notions (they have no place
in the great conceptual systems, nor in psychoanalysis), they can
easily switch or be confused. So if one takes seduction to be a chal¬
lenge, a game where the bets are never down, an uninterrupted
ritual exchange, an infinite escalation of the ante, a secret complicity,
etc., one can always answer: “But so defined, wouldn’t seduction be
simply love?”

We can even invert the relation and make love something more
decisive, more challenging than seduction. Love is fulfillment only

130 / Fatal Strategies

if you think of it, say, narcissistically: I love the other because he is
like me, therefore I duplicate myself—I love the other because he is
my opposite; therefore I complete myself. However, one can con¬
ceive of love as gratuitous, as an elan towards the other that expects
no answer, as a challenge that incites the other to love me more than
I love him, therefore as a perpetually higher bid, while one can also
take seduction as endgame, a tactic that attempts to manipulate the
other to one’s own ends.

There’s no argument possible against turning these terms
around. Seduction and love may exchange their sublime and most
vulgar meanings, which makes it almost impossible to talk about
them. All the more so in that we are caught up today in a revival
of the discourse of love, a reactivation of the affect by ennui and
saturation. An effect of amorous simulation. Mad love, love as pas¬
sion, are quite dead as heroic and sublime movements. What is at
stake today is a demand for love, affect, passion, at a time when the
need for it is cruelly felt. A whole generation has gone through the
liberation of desire and of pleasure, a whole generation that is tired
of sex and which reinvents love as an affective or passionate sup¬
plement. Other generations, romantic or postromantic, have lived
it as passion, destiny. Our own is only neoromantic.

After so much sexual bathos, here we have the neopathos of the
amorous relation. After the libidinal and instinctual, here is the
neoromanticism of passion. But it is no longer a matter of predes¬
tination or fatality, it’s only a matter of liberating one potentiality
among others and, after such a long phase of “repressive desubli¬
mation,” as Marcuse would say, of clearing the way for a
progressive resublimation.

Sex—like the relations of production—was too simple. It is
never too late to go beyond Marx and Freud.

Ironic Strategies / 131

There is, then, a kind of love that is only the froth of a culture
of sex, and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about this new
apparatus of ambiance. Forms of simulation can be recognized by
the fact that nothing sets them off from each other; sex, love,
seduction, perversion, porn, can all coexist on one and the same
libidinal band, without exclusivity, with the blessing of psycho¬
analysis. A stereophonic concerto: one adds love, passion,
seduction to sex in exactly the same way psychosociology and
“teamwork” were added to the assembly line.

This situation is interesting as a symptom of the exhaustion of
a whole obscene constellation of sexuality (obscene not because of
sex itself, but because of the obscenity of truth when it is spoken
and revealed). We’ve come to the end of the cycle of sexuality as
truth. This makes possible once again a reversion to forms whose
profile and charm found themselves eclipsed by the hegemonic per¬
spective of sex.

To find again a kind of distinction, a hierarchy for all these fig¬
ures—seduction, love, passion, desire, sex—is without doubt an
absurd wager, but it’s the only one we have left.

In our culture, seduction has known a kind of golden age,
which lasted from the Renaissance to the 18 th century: it is then—
like politeness, or court manners—a conventional, aristocratic
form, a game of strategy without any special connection to love.
The latter has for us tonalities that are different, ulterior, romantic
and romanesque: no longer a game or a ceremony, it is a passion, a
discourse. What sweeps you away is the force of desire; what calls
you is death. It has nothing to do with seduction. Love, of course,
knew courtly forms, in the Mediterranean culture of the thirteenth
century. But the meaning it has for us was fashioned essentially at the
end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,

132 / Fatal Strategies

counter to the superficial game of seduction. There occurs a rup¬
ture between a form of dual game of strategic illusion and a new
individual finality of fulfillment of desire, whose great advent is
that of the constellation of desire, whether sexual or psychic, of the
individual, or political desire of the masses. Whatever the case may
be with this desire and its “liberation,” it no longer has anything to
do with the aristocratic game of challenge and seduction.

Another thing: seduction is pagan, love is Christian. It is Christ who
begins wanting to love and to be loved. Religion becomes affect,
suffering and love, none of which the archaic and ancient mytholo¬
gies cared about in the least; for them the world’s sovereignty resides
in the regulated play of signs and appearances, in ceremonials of
metamorphosis, and therefore in acts of seduction par excellence. No
affect in any of this, no love, nothing like a great divine or natural
flux, no need of psychology, either, of this subjective inferiority
where the myth of love will flower. 4 Only the ritual exists, and ritual
is in the realm of seduction. Love is born from the destruction of
ritual forms, from their liberation. Its energy is an energy of the
dissolution of these forms, including the magic rituals of the
seduction of the world (which continued in Christian heresies, in
the form of Manichean or revolutionary denials of the real world).
Cruel, rigorous forms of the sign in its pure functioning, opposed

4. But if you take seduction in the Christian sense, then everything changes:
seduction begins with Christianity; it is the diabolical curse that comes to fracture
the divine order—or else it is Christ himself, according to Nietzsche, Christ come
to seduce people to his own person, come to pervert them with psychology and
love? Conversely, there is no seduction in Greece, where love is homosexual and
pedagogic—a virtue, not a passion.

Ironic Strategies / 133

to the reality of the world, a mastery of pure appearances, without
psychology, without affect, without love. The maximal intensity
of these cultures—from which love and its entire metaphysics of
salvation issue as if by decomposition—is an effusion of forms
until then secret, initiatory, jealous of themselves, intensive, whereas
love is a proselytizing energy, radiant and extensive—exoteric,
whereas ritual is esoteric. Love is expression, heat, avowal, commu¬
nication, and therefore a passage of energy from a potential,
concentrated state to one that is liberated, radiating, caloric, and
thereby endemic and degraded. It will therefore be the ferment of
a popular and democratic religion, as opposed to hierarchical and
aristocratic orders governed by rule.

Love is the end of the rule and the beginning of the law. It is the
beginning of a disorder where things will be ordered according to
feeling, affective investment, that is to say, a heavy substance, heavy
with meaning, and no longer according to the play of signs—a
lighter substance, more ductile, more superficial. God is going to
love his own, which he had never done, and the world will no longer
be a game. We have inherited all of this—and love is only the effect
of this dissolution of rules and of the energy liberated by this fusion.
The form opposite to love would then be observance: wherever a
rule and a game are reinvented, love disappears. Compared to the
regulated and highly conventional intensities of the game or the cer¬
emony, love is a system of freely circulating energy. It is therefore
charged with a whole ideology of liberation and free circulation; it
is the pathos of modernity.

The distinctive quality of a universal passion like love is that it
is individual and that everyone finds himself alone in it. Seduction
is dual: I cannot seduce if I am not already seduced, no one can
seduce me if he is not already seduced. No one can play without

134 / Fatal Strategies

another—that is the basic rule—while I may love without being
loved in return. I love without being loved, that’s my problem. If I
don’t love you, that’s your problem. If someone doesn’t please me,
that’s his problem. This is why jealousy is like a natural dimension
of love while it is foreign to seduction—the affective bond is never
absolutely sure, whereas the pact of signs is without ambiguity and
without appeal. Furthermore, to seduce someone is not to invest
him, nor to absorb him psychologically; seduction does not know
this territorial jealousy that goes by the name of love.

I am not saying that love is only jealousy, but that some well-
tempered jealousy always enters into it, something exclusive, some
subjective claim. Perhaps it even precedes love: a primordial passion,
as with the Greek gods, who know neither love nor sentimentality
but are already tremendously jealous of each other.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every
trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murder¬
ous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb
him into a black light. Everything is gambled on an exorbitant
demand for the exclusivity of a human being, whoever it may be.
This is doubtless what makes it a passion: its object is interiorized as
an ideal end, and we know that the only ideal object is a dead one.

In comparison to seduction, love would be, then, a looser form,
a more far-reaching solution and even a way of dissolution. But a
pathetic dissolution, at least in its more elevated forms, those that
have produced the novel, for instance. This pathetic relief is going
to disappear in the later peripety, which is simply that of sexuality.
The latter becomes only a relational style articulated on the “objec¬
tive” difference between the sexes. Seduction is still ceremonial, love
is still pathetic, but sexuality is no longer anything but relational.
From one form to another, what is at stake in signs is eliminated in

Ironic Strategies / 135

favor of organic, energetic, and economic functioning, based on the
smallest possible difference, that between the sexes.

It’s a mystification, in effect, to think of sexual difference as
original difference, the source of all other differences, which would
be only metaphors for this one. This is to forget that from time
immemorial men have produced greater differential intensities
through artificial systems than from bodies and biology. At least
they have never thought of “natural” differences as anything but a
particular example of artificial ones. Literally, pure sexual difference
is of no interest. (Yin and Yang are another thing: these are two
metaphysical poles between which exist the tensions that organize
the world.) In certain cultures the differences warrior/nonwarrior,
brahmin/nonbrahmin mean a lot more than sexual difference: they
produce more differential energy, they organize things with more
rigor and complexity. In all cultures except our own, the distinction
between dead and alive, noble and ignoble, initiated and noniniti-
ated, is infinitely more significant than the distinction between the
sexes. Sexuality signals, in fact, with its biological and pretentious
evidence, the weakest and poorest difference, the one that’s left over
after all other differences have been lost.

Any naturalistic principle of differentiation is necessarily weaker,
and is far from being able to support—as is the powerful artifice of
signs—a meticulous arrangement, a ceremony of the world.

Seduction is the era of an aesthetic and ceremonial difference
between the sexes.

Love (passion) is the era of a moral and affective sexual difference.

Sexuality is the era of psychological, biological and political
difference between the sexes.

This is why seduction is more intelligible than love: because
it operates at the level of a higher form, a dual form, a perfect

136 / Fatal Strategies

differential form. Sex, of all differential forms, is the one where
difference matters least. As to love, it is found always occupying an
intermediary place in the spectral parade of figures: from the limits
of seduction to the borders of sex, it describes a universe which
goes from a pure form of difference to an equally pure one of
indifference—but it doesn’t have its own form and, as such, it is
indescribable. It is not the dual form of seduction that is myste¬
rious, it is, rather, the individual figure of the subject tracked by
his own desire or in quest of his own image.

Destiny is imposed on us with stunning irrefutability: but it is
nondestiny that needs to be explained. This, too, is all we can really
do with it: rationalize it. Because somehow, profoundly, as with
love’s banality, there’s nothing to say about it.

Seduction is not mysterious; it is enigmatic. The enigma, like the
secret, is not unintelligible.

It is, on the contrary, fully intelligible, but it cannot be said or
revealed. Such is seduction: inexplicable evidence. Such is the
game. At the heart of any game is a fundamental, secret rule, an
enigma; nevertheless, the whole process is no mystery; nothing is
more intelligible than a game in progress.

Love itself is charged with all the world’s mystery, but it’s not
enigmatic. It is, on the contrary, heavy with meaning, being of the
order, not of the enigmatic but of the solution. “The key to the
enigma is love,” or more brutally: “Sex is at the bottom of every¬
thing.” (Miraculous truth, revealed in the 20th century, but why?
Don’t believe a word of it: the enigma remains entire and retains all
its seductive power.)

From one figure to the other, from seduction to love, then to
desire, sexuality, finally to pure and simple porno; the farther you

Ironic Strategies / 137

go, the closer you come to the lesser secret, the smaller enigma,
towards avowal, expression, unveiling, liberation of the repressed;
the closer you come to truth, in a word, which soon becomes, in the
obscenity of our culture, the compulsory statement of truth, the
forced confession, the obliged revelation... of what, moreover? Of
nothing, exactly. There is nothing to reveal.

From where could there have originated the crazy idea of
revealing the secret, exposing the bare substance, touching radical
obscenity? That, in itself, is a utopia. There is no real, there never
was a real. Seduction knows this, and preserves its enigma. All other
forms, and love in particular, are gossipy and prolix. They say too
much, they want to say too much. Love talks a lot, it’s a discourse.
It declares itself and culminates often in this declaration where it is
at an end. Highly ambiguous act of language, almost indecent; these
things aren’t said; how can you say to someone “I love you”? They
appear too fragile to be wrapped in an enunciation, unless that is the
only life they really have, in which case they are no longer secret at
all. These things live only in their silence, or on their denial: “I don’t
love you at all,” or even “I won’t see you anymore,” phrases still
weighted with the challenge and suspense of seduction, imminence
of love, but which still maintain, by the grace of denial, a quality of
game, a lightness of lure.

Happily, anyway, “I love you” does not mean what it says, and
it should be understood otherwise—in the seductive mood (all
verbs have a secret mood, beyond the indicative and imperative, the
seductive). Seduction is a modality of all discourse, including the
discourse of love (at least, let’s hope so). Which means that it plays
games with its enunciation and affects the other differently than
stated. So with “I love you”; isn’t it said not to tell you you’re loved,
but to seduce you? It is a proposition that oscillates on its two sides,

138 / Fatal Strategies

and which thereby retains the insoluble charm of appearances, of
what is senseless and therefore useless to believe. Believing “I love
you” puts an end to everything, including love, since that would be
to accord meaning to that which has none.

This is a best-case scenario, when ambiguity still controls dis¬
course. In the case of sexual demand, there is no longer a trace of
ambiguity. Everything is meant, all is said, there is no secret
demand, all is in its expression. If desire is really being avowed,
then it would be enough to hear the words of confession, the play
of appearances would be useless. Likewise, “I love you” then takes
on another meaning; it is no longer seductive, it is no more than a
desperate optative: “I demand to love you,” “I demand that you
love me.”

We can agree with Lacan: there is no sexual rapport, there is no
truth of sex. Either “I love you” and “I desire you” mean something
else entirely—seduction—or they signify a demand for the love of
desire, never love or sex in themselves. There’s always a missed ren¬
dezvous, and sexuality, as Lacan has it, is the story of this missed
meeting. But that isn’t the last word, because the subtler spiral of
seduction describes not the history but the game of the missed
encounter, and also that other pleasure it knows how to soak from
this charming and absurd difference that nature has put between
the sexes.

And so what was challenge and seduction ends in solicitude.
Seduce me, love me, make me come, pay attention to me. Charac¬
teristic and obsessional trait, that can go all the way to an almost
fetal demand for love (the fetal strategies).

There has been, for the last two or three centuries in our cul¬
ture, an overdetermination of all forms of love (including love of
nature) through maternal love and the sentimentality that derives

Ironic Strategies /139

from it. Seduction alone escapes this, because it is not a demand
but a challenge; it opposes this overdetermination the way the duel
is opposed to fusion.

That kind of love (maternal) is no more than a floating libido
that is vented just about everywhere and tries desperately to invest
its environment, according to an economy that is no longer that of
passionate systems but that of subsystems of intensity—cold and
dispassionate. Ecological libido, a product specific to our epoch,
spread out everywhere in homeopathic and homeostatic doses, is
the minimal differential of affect that is enough to fuel social and
psychological demand. Floating, it can be drained, diverted,
magnetized from one niche to another, according to the flow. It
corresponds ideally to an order of manipulation.

And so the energy of dissolution of seduction passes into the
passionate order of love, and ends up in the aleatory order of
demand.

Fortunately, there is a backfire, which corrects all that I’ve just
said about demand. For by responding in the terms in which the
situation is posed—in which it pretends to be posed—one runs the
risk of misunderstanding. Perhaps it is simply soliciting—in its
very hysteria—being denied, being refused, being disappointed,
seeking the reply that that’s not how things really happen. Just as
any other discourse is proferred only in the hope of being denied
and exorcized, so the demand can, actually, be only toying with the
confession of desire, the call to solicitude of another, in order to set
a trap for him, to lure and therefore seduce him.

140 / Fatal Strategies

The Object and Its Destiny

The Supremacy of the Object

“Only the subject desires; only the object seduces.”

We have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the
poverty of the object. It is the subject that makes history, it’s the
subject that totalizes the world. Individual subject or collective sub¬
ject, the subject of consciousness or of the unconscious, the ideal of
all metaphysics is that of world subject; the object is only a detour
on the royal road of subjectivity.

The fate of the object, to my knowledge, has been claimed by
no one. It is not even intelligible as such: it is only the alienated,
accursed part of the subject. The object is shamed, obscene, pas¬
sive, prostituted, the incarnation of Evil, of pure alienation. A
slave, its only glory would be to enter into a master-slave dialectic,
where one can see the dawning of a new gospel, the promise of the
object changing into a subject.

Who has ever sensed the foreboding of the particular and sovereign
potency of the object? In our philosophy of desire, the subject retains
an absolute privilege, since it is the subject that desires. But everything
is inverted if one passes on to the thought of seduction. There, it’s no
longer the subject which desires, it’s the object which seduces.

141

Everything comes from the object and everything returns to it,
just as everything started with seduction, not with desire. The
immemorial privilege of the subject is overthrown. For the subject
is fragile and can only desire, whereas the object gets on very well
even when desire is absent; the object seduces through the absence
of desire; it plays on the other with the effect of desire, provoking
or annuling it, exalting and deceiving it—precisely the power that
we’ve wanted or preferred to forget.

Why privilege the position of the subject, why support this
fiction of a will, a conscience, even of an unconscious for the
subject? Because the subject has an economy and a history which
is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium betweeen a will and a
world, a drive and an object, the balancing principle of the uni¬
verse, and again this is quite reassuring, for then it is not delivered
up to the multiple, monstrous and fascinating universe, the cruel
and aleatory universe of seduction come from out of the blue, nor
is it the victim or the prey of all surrounding forms, living or dead,
nor traversed by incessant seductions. We’ve really protected the
subject: it will have been there from the beginning, with its drives,
its desire, its will, in its fief, miraculously equipped to no longer be
the object of anything at all.

Calling the subject into question hasn’t changed much con¬
cerning the metaphysical postulate of its preeminence. Summoned
to put into play, as a subject, its weakness, fragility, femininity
and death, summoned to resign as a subject (not only the psycho¬
logical subject, but also the subject of power and knowledge), the
subject has only found itself trapped in the melodrama of its own
disappearance—it has overdosed on resignation, it is convulsing
on its foundations, looking for a gentleman’s agreement with its
object, the world, which it had felt strong enough to manipulate

142 / Fatal Strategies

to its own advantage. There results only a confusion, reflected
today in all the vagaries of its “liberation.” But the subject, the
metaphysics of the subject, was beautiful only in its arrogant
glory, in its caprice, in its inexhaustible will to power, in its tran¬
scendence as the subject of power, the subject of history, or in the
dramaturgy of its alienation. Finished with all that, it is now only
a miserable carcass in conflict with its own desire or its own
image, incapable of managing a coherent representation of the
world, pointlessly sacrificed on the corpse of history in an
attempted resurrection.

The subject cannot play the card of its own fragility, nor of its
own death, for the simple reason that it had been invented precisely
as a safeguard against these things, as well as against the seduc¬
tions—those of destiny, for instance—that carried the subject
down to its ruin. Here there is an insoluble contradiction in the
perspective of its own economy. And therefore, today, the position
of the subject has become simply untenable. No one today can be
assumed as the subject of power, knowledge, or history. And no
one, furthermore, tries to. No one assumes this incommensurable
role, which began to founder in ridicule with the world of bour¬
geois psychology, and today subjectivity finds itself simply erased
into transparency and indifference. We are living through the con¬
vulsions of this subjectivity, and we haven’t stopped inventing new
ones—but this is no longer even diverting: the problematic of
alienation has collapsed; the solidity of desire has become myth.

We arrive then at this paradox, at this conjuncture where the
position of the subject has become untenable, and where the
only possible position is that of the object. The only strategy
possible is that of the object. We should understand, by this, not the
“alienated” object in the process of de-alienation, the enslaved

The Object and Its Destiny / 143

object claiming its autonomy as a subject, but the object such as
it challenges the subject, and pushes it back upon its own
impossible position.

A strategy whose secret is: the object does not believe in its own
desire; the object does not live off the illusion of its own desire; the
object has no desire. It does not believe that anything belongs to it
as property, and it entertains no fantasies of reappropriation or
autonomy. It doesn’t seek to ground itself in some nature proper to
it, not even a nature of desire, but at the same time it knows no
alterity and is inalienable. It is not divided with itself—which is the
destiny of the subject—and it knows nothing of the mirror phase,
where it would come to be caught by its own imaginary.

It is the mirror. It is that which returns the subject to its mortal
transparency. So if it can fascinate or seduce the subject, it is
because it radiates no substance or meaning of its own. The pure
object is sovereign, because it is what breaks up the sovereignty of
the other and catches it in its own trap. The crystal takes revenge.

The object is what has disappeared on the horizon of the
subject, and it is from the depths of this disappearance that it
envelopes the subject in its fatal strategy. It is the subject that then
disappears from the horizon of the object.

This is true of the sexual object, powerful in its absence of
desire; this is true of the masses, powerful in their silence.

Desire does not exist; the only desire is to be the destiny of the
other, to become for him the event that exceeds all subjectivity, that
checks, in its fatal advent, all possible subjectivity, that absolves the
subject of its ends, its presence, and of all responsibility to itself and
to the world, in a passion that is—finally, definitively—objective.

The possibility, the will of the subject to situate itself at the tran¬
scendental heart of the world and to think of itself as universal

144 / Fatal Strategies

causality, under the sign of a law of which it remains master, this
will does not prevent the subject from invoking the object secretly,
like a fetish, like a talisman, like a figure of the reversal of causality,
like the locus of a violent hemorrhage of subjectivity. “Behind the
subjectivity of appearances there is always an occulted objectivity.”

The entire destiny of the subject passes into the object. For
universal causality, irony substitutes the fatal power of a singular
object.

The fetish illustrates the profound objection we entertain
towards normal causality, towards the derisory pretention of
assigning a cause to each event and each event to its cause.

Any effect is sublime if not reduced to its cause. Furthermore,
only the effect is necessary; the cause is accidental.

The fetish performs this miracle of erasing the accidentality of
the world and substituting for it an absolute necessity.

We sense in the apperception of causes only a relative necessi¬
ty—and therefore a relative happiness. Only an absolute, ecstatic
necessity can transport us. This is exactly what is realized by the
pure and singular object, through which we at one stroke obtain
the answer to all our worldly prayers.

We may live in the universal, pursue objective ends, distribute
our life among the clear forms of alterity, accord things a more-or-
less rational aspect (which can never equal the one we accord
ourselves); nevertheless, at a given moment happiness and unhap¬
piness, and the very fact of being alive at all, must be incarnated in
an absolutely particular being or thing, which no longer corre¬
sponds to any universal determination, but where all the
recapitulated forms of identity and otherness are precipitated in the
form of a specific unjustifiable affect, completely artificial with
respect to the “natural” qualities of this object.

The Object and Its Destiny / 145

No one escapes from this experience of investing an object, as
an object, with all the occulted force of objectivity. This is also part
of the absurd wagers we make, as was the case for Pascal’s famous
wager on the existence of God.

We need to believe that the wager we’re making is somehow
right, for if reason has it that a single object alone could not be at
the origin of the world, but, on the contrary, should be explained
objectively by all the worldly givens—if this reasoning cannot
manage to sway our conviction; if, in spite of the rational evi¬
dence, we continue to adore the world in the unintelligible
quintessence of a single one of its details, then this is because rea¬
son itself is a hypothetical wager.

No longer to explain things and to set their value in objective
criteria and in an unbounded system of references, but, on the con¬
trary, to implicate the whole world in a single one of its details, an
entire event in a single one of its features, all the energy of nature
in a single one of its objects, dead or alive—to find the esoteric
ellipsis, the perfect shortcut toward the pure object, the one which
is not involved in the division of meaning, and which shares its
secret and power with no other.

The Absolute Commodity

The absolute object is one that is worthless, whose quality is a
matter of indifference, but which escapes objective alienation in
that it has made itself more of an object than the object—this
gives it a fatal quality.

This escalation to the limit, this doubly revolutionary move¬
ment—responding to alienation in its own terms, following the

146 / Fatal Strategies

inexorable ways of indifference—is found prefigured in the
absolute commodity, according to Baudelaire. 5 Art (the work of art),

5. Giorgio Agamben, Stances (Paris: Christian Bourgois): “He (Baudelaire) approves the
new character conferred on the object by its transformation into commodity; and he
shows himself conscious of the attraction that this trait would fatally exert on the work
of art... The greatness of Baudelaire, before the invasion of commodities, is to have
answered to this invasion by transforming the work of art itself into commodity and
fetish... In other words hes brought the separation of exchange-value from use-value
right up to the work of art itself... whence Baudelaires implacable polemic against any
utilitarian interpretation of art, his insistence on the intangible character of the aesthedc
experience, and his theory of the beautiful as instantaneous and impenetrable epiphany.
The aura of cold materiality which begins at that point to surround the work of art is
equivalent to the character of fetish conferred upon commodities by exchange-value...

Baudelaire was not content only with reproducing in the work of art the scission
between exchange-value and use-value. He proposed the creation of a commodity
somehow absolute, in which the process of fetishization would be pushed to the point
of annihilating the very reality of commodification as such; he conceived of com¬
modities in which use-value and exchange-value would abolish each other mutually,
whose value consists, therefore, in its inutility and whose use is its own intangibility,
and which is no longer commodity: the transformation of the work of art into absolute
commodity is therefore the most radical abolition of commodity. Here is where orig¬
inates the casualness with which Baudelaire places the experience of shock’ at the
center of his artistic work. The ‘shock’ is the potential for strangeness that objects are
charged with, when—in order to assume the enigmatic mask of commodity—they
lose the authority conferred upon them by use-value... Baudelaire understood that to
assure the survival of art in industrial civilization, the artist would have to seek the
reproduction in his work of this destruction of use-value and traditional intelligibili¬
ty.... The auto-negation of art became therefore its only possibility for survival.

Its fortunate that the founder of modern poetry was a fetishist. Without his
passion for feminine makeup and hairstyle, for jewelry and ornament, Baudelaire
would have been painfully hard put to emerge victorious in his confrontation with
commodities.”

The Object and Its Destiny / 147

confronted in modern times with the challenge of the commodity,
does not, nor should it, look for its rescue in a critical denial (in which
case it would only be its own derisory and impotent mirror, just as,
by dint of critical denial, dialectical thought has become nothing but
the powerless and derisory mirror of capital), but rather in outbidding
the very formal and fetishized abstraction of commodities, under
the enchantment of exchange-value—becoming more commodity
than commodity, since even farther from all use-value.

If the commodity form breaks down the anterior ideality of the
object (its beauty, its authenticity, even its functionality), then we
shouldn’t try to resuscitate it by denying the formal essence of com¬
modities, we should, on the contrary—and here’s the whole strategy
of modernity, which constitutes for Baudelaire the entire perverse
and adventurous seduction of the modern world—push to the
absolute its division of value. No dialectic between the two; synthe¬
sis is a soft solution, dialectics a nostalgic one. The only radical and
modern answer: potentiate what is new, original, unexpected in the
commodity—for example, its formal indifference to utility and
value, the preeminence given to circulation. That is what the work
of art should be: it should adopt all the qualities of shock, strange¬
ness, surprise, disquietude, liquidity, even autodestruction, the
instantaneity and unreality which belong to the commodity.

The inhumanity of exchange-value is to be exponentially mul¬
tiplied in a kind of ecstatic but ironic orgasm over the indifferent
ways of alienation. This is why, in the enchanted, ironic (and non-
dialectical) logic of Baudelaire, the work of art becomes one with
fashion, advertising, the “fairy land of the code”—a work of art
that bewilders in its venality, mobility, effects of missing referent,
chance, vertigo—a pure object of marvellous commutability, since,
the causes having disappeared, all effects are virtually equivalent.

148/ Fatal Strategies

These effects can amount to nothing also, as we well know, but
its the business of the work of art to make a fetish of this nullity, this
disappearance, and to draw from it extraordinary consequences. A
new form of seduction: no longer a matter of the mastery of con¬
ventional effects, the mastery of illusion and of the aesthetic order,
but rather of the vertigo of obscenity—but who can tell the differ¬
ence? A vulgar commodity can generate only a universe of
production—and God knows that this universe is a sad one! Raised
to the power of absolute commodity, it produces effects of seduction.

The work of art—a new and triumphant fetish and not a sad
alienated one—should work to deconstruct its own traditional
aura, its authority and power of illusion, in order to shine resplen¬
dent in the pure obscenity of the commodity. It must annihilate
itself as familiar object and become monstrously foreign. But this
foreignness is not the disquieting strangeness of the repressed or
alienated object; this object does not shine from its being haunted,
or out of some secret dispossession; it glows with a veritable seduc¬
tion that comes from elsewhere, from having exceeded its own
form and become pure object, pure event.

This perspective, whose source for Baudelaire is the spectacle of
the transfiguration of the commodity in the Universal Exposition
of 1855, is superior in many ways to that of Walter Benjamin. In
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin
derives from the objects loss of aura and authenticity, in the age of
reproduction, a desperately political determination (that is to say,
politically desperate), opening on melancholy modernity—while
the idea of Baudelaire, infinitely more modern (but could one
possibly be modern in the nineteenthth century?), embraces the
exploration of new forms of seduction linked to pure objects and
events, to that modern passion which is fascination.

The Object and Its Destiny / 149

In this, Baudelaire was better at resisting the depressing theory
of alienation (which has had only damaging effects on the slack
thought of the twentieth century); he better grasped—possibly
because of the historical novelty of the eruption of commodi¬
ties—what would be the only real response, aesthetic and
metaphysical, ironical and joyous, to the challenge. And we
shouldn’t be fooled by Baudelaire’s “aesthetic preoccupations.”
His idea of an absolute commodity is tantamount to a radical
perspective in every domain . 6

In Praise of the Sexual Object
Only the object is seductive.

The vulgar seducer has understood nothing at all. He thinks of
himself as subject, of the other as victim of his strategy. A naive psy¬
chology, as much as that of the “beautiful souls” who take the role

6. This said, Marx also began with the idea of the commodity as an inescapable
little fact and supreme foreign ess of the modern world. He begins with the inex¬
plicable, not really in order to explain it but to change it into an enigma, upon
which all his dogma founders. Hieroglyphics. Marx had allowed something enig¬
matic and enchanting to float above the commodity, its anxiously foreign quality,
its challenge to the meaningful arrangement of things, to the real, morality, utility,
to all values including the very idea of value itself.

It is this ambiguous fascination that we find in all the phenomena of capital,
in the enchantment of this universal code, at least in its original aspects. Marxist
dogma has crushed all that (Marx contributed to this himself). The entire enigma
of capital, of the commodity, has been massacred by revolutionary morality; but
where is—where could there be—a revolutionary immorality?

150 / Fatal Strategies

of victim: neither realizes that all initiative and power are on the
other side, the side of the object.

Furthermore, the vulgarity of this analysis of seduction recurs
in the analysts themselves; the seducer himself is not so stupid
(neither is the victim), and he knows implicitly that if seduction
amounted to nothing more than this pitiful psychology, it would
never work. Is it not rather the seducer who is seduced, and does
the initiative not revert secretly to the object? The seducer
believes he envelopes it in his strategy, but he is caught by the lure
of this banal strategy and it is rather the object that envelopes him
in its fatal strategy.

What charms us is that which takes the shape of a predes¬
tined object. This is what raises the ante on pure objectness, as
Sartre would say, so that you are delivered from it in your turn—
just as the absolute commodity liberates you more radically from
commodities.

Sartre: “In seduction I am not at all trying to expose my
subjectivity to the other. To seduce is to assume entirely, and as
a risk to be run, my objectness for the other; it is to put myself
before his gaze and to be looked at by him; it is to run the risk
of being seen to appropriate the other in and by my objectness.
I refuse to leave the terrain of my object-ness: it is on this
ground that I wish to engage the struggle by making myself into
a fascinating object...”

Only that which no longer poses the problem of its own desire
(the hysteric, for example, who couldn’t care less about it), is seduc¬
tive, only that which has passed through the absolution and
resolution of its own desire.

And so the cruel story of the woman to whom a man has written
a passionate letter and who asks in her turn: “What part of me

The Object and Its Destiny / 151

seduced you the most?” To which he replies, “Your eyes,” and
receives by return mail, wrapped in a package, the eye which
seduced him.

The beauty and violence of this defiance against the platitude
of the seducer. But also the diabolism of this woman, who takes
revenge against the very wish to be seduced: trap for trap, eye for
eye. Never did punishment take so awful a form as in this
unscrupulous offering. She loses an eye, but he loses face—how
will he be able from now on to “cast an eye” on a single woman
without being afraid of getting one in return? For really nothing is
worse than to utter a wish and to have it literally fulfilled; nothing
is worse than to be rewarded on the exact level of ones demand.
He is caught in the trap by the object that surrenders to him as a
literal object.

This is the portion of fatal provocation which is in each object,
always ready to renew the cruel game of seduction. The man cannot
but respond to the womans engaging question: “What part of me
do you find most attractive?” and commits thereby an irreparable
mistake. The vengeful logic of the object is there first of all. (We
might wonder what would have happened if he had replied: your
voice, your mouth, your sex, your soul, your look, whatever—but
this question is no doubt meaningless, for in the courtly context
the only possible reply is the eyes as metaphor for the soul.)

This is, in fact, exactly the metaphor that the woman chooses to
repudiate, which privileges her absolutely. He, as subject, can play
only the game of the metaphor. She, abjuring all metaphor, becomes
the fatal object which drags the subject down to annihilation.

For this to happen a confusion of sign and body suffices, a
shortcut basically like Harpo Marx showing a real swordfish instead
and in place of the password swordfish.” Here the witticism is

152 / Fatal Strategies

cruder, but it denies the password “your eyes” in the same way, and
along with it the entire idealized rhetoric of seduction. For he only
speaks to her of her eyes and her look as if he were talking about
her: she is free to respond to this by the gift of herself, but not of
her eye as object pure and simple. This cruel realist short circuit
isn’t far removed from what can be translated elsewhere as the
cannibalistic consumption of the loved object—here it’s the
extraversion of the self as pure object that operates as pitiless
gratification. The object strategy, that of the woman, consists in
interdicting the metaphorical displacement of discourse, from the
eye to the look and from the look to being, the only way the subject
can exist and allow itself to be seduced.

This liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into
brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy. It is of the
same order as the meaningless event, the catastrophe, which is also a
blind reply, without metaphor, of the world as object to man as
subject. It’s always like this that destiny becomes specific: at a given
moment, at a given point, signs become objects, impossible to turn
into metaphors, cruel, without appeal. They cut short any decipher¬
ment, become confused with things (which is why fate is a dreamer,
with the unintelligible instantaneity signs and words have in dreams).

The strategy of the object, like that of the woman in the story,
is to be confused with the thing desired. All the irony and cruelty
lies in this excessively objective form of answer: it leaves the subject
without recourse.

This is also a beautiful example of the woman’s ability to play
in two registers: that of directly sexual supply and demand (she can
reply without condition to the demand, like the woman with her
eye, and the man finds himself naked and obscene in his own eyes,
naked and humiliated in his enjoyment of the object)—or else that

The Object and Its Destiny / 153

of the game, the lure, the metaphor, deferred sexuality. The man
has no such possibility. The woman remains free to choose the
terrain. The man is continually exposed to loss of face: if he risks
sexual advances, he always runs the danger of refusal; if he engages
in a subtler game, he falls prey to a subtler form of rejection. The
inverse is not true. The woman is not in the position of desire; she’s
in the much higher position of object of desire.

Naturally she loses this prerogative when she turns away from
the indifference of the object to desire. She then becomes as vul¬
nerable as any subject, and she will, as such, come to know all the
forms of this useless suffering.

The transfer of sexual initiative to the woman has created a new
situation. For the masculine prerogative, from the time of the
“woman as object,” at least gave rise to a whole culture of passion
and seduction, to a novelistic culture linked to the game of sexual
interdiction. Such a culture is scarcely possible in the opposite
direction. One doesn’t see the man assuming the modesty and
secrecy, provocations and withdrawl, the whole sublime and sub¬
liminal strategy of the object which made for the eternal feminine.
There is no eternal masculine because there is no interdiction
which protects the man from the sexual demand of the woman.
The woman who wants a man has no need to seduce. The man, if
the woman so wishes, will still have to seduce her.

And if the constraint of object femininity has ceased for the
woman, on the other hand the constraint of virility has not ceased
for the man. He finds himself called upon to respond, to keep from
losing face, to the sexual demand of the woman—a situation in
which the latter has never found herself, for she has always had the
possibility of eluding it, in seduction and refusal in particular,
where she did not risk losing face (quite the contrary).

154 / Fatal Strategies

This is perhaps the meaning of Fellini’s film (The City of
Women)-, man is defenseless, naked and uncertain before the
monsters of deployed femininity, erratic fantasies of all possible
femininity without the shadow of a hint of seduction.

The situation is therefore no longer dual but unilateral. The
object woman was sovereign and remained mistress of seduction
(by a secret rule of the game of desire). The object man is only a
subject stripped naked, an orphan of desire, dreaming of a lost
mastery—neither a subject nor truly an object of desire, but only
the mythical instrument of a cruel liberty.

One can say of any object, in its immobility and aphasia, what
Canetti says about animals: “If you look attentively at an animal,
you get the feeling that a man is hidden inside and is making fun
of you.”

We could say of women that someone else is hidden inside and
is mocking us. Women are so skilled, they seem to be so submis¬
sive, they know so well, too well, how to be unhappy—there must
be something there that is hiding and lying in wait. That same
objective irony that lies in wait for all subjectivity with every
chance of conquering it.

Something in the woman ignores possession. Something in the
object ignores possession. Possession is the preoccupation and pride
of the subject, but not of the object, which is totally indifferent
to it, as to its liberation. The object wants only to seduce—that
is how it plays its servitude, just as animals do their silence, the
stones their indifference, and women their look—the object
always wins.

So why pride oneself on difference, when indifference is sure to
prevail? Why avail oneself of meaning when silence is sure to win?

The Object and Its Destiny / 155

The power of the object lies in its irony. Difference is always serious,
but indifference is ironic.

Thus the woman can demand to be recognized as a subject in
her own right (besides, this is a new style of seduction, and the
game of the emancipation of subjects is not without charm when
it leads to objective delights on both sides), and the man willingly
allows himself to be caught in this trap, for he too likes to consent
to some sacrifice. But if he lets himself be trapped, he is lost, lost
by looking ridiculous in the eyes of the woman which watch him
from the depths of her objective irony (from that occult irony that
belies any pretention of liberation), just as he would be lost by
looking ridiculous in the eyes of an animal he would like to recog¬
nize as a subject in its own right. That is where the trap is set; that
is where it closes.

No one can regard as anything but ridiculous the pretension
of recognizing anyone as “a subject in its own right.” And there¬
fore, when the woman pretends to this (“I don’t want to be
seduced; I want to be recognized”), it is a trap into which the
man easily falls, because it is pleasant to be regarded as a source
of recognition. Actually, this demand is ironic, but he doesn’t
know it.

What this woman wants, what we all want as objects (and we
are objects as much as subjects, and doubtless in a more original
way—not passive objects, but passionate objects, with drives that
come from the depths of their object-being) is not to be halluci¬
nated and exalted as a subject in her own right, but rather to be
taken profoundly as object, just as she is, with her senseless,
immoral, supersensual character—object, that is to say, delivered
over to everything and everyone, prey and universal predator,
maybe even possessed, prostituted, enslaved, manipulated and

156 / Fatal Strategies

marked as such, but also, from the depths of all that, perfectly
seductive and inalienable. Once we recognize this fundamental
character (this liberty) of the sexual object, the woman is ready for
all the games of love and psychology; but it is as a pure object, not
as a subject, that she’ll seduce you, that you’ll seduce her. She can
be dominated, exploited, seduced—but not through alienation,
submission, or masochism (the mistake is always to bring the
object down to the level of the defective and perverse psychology
of the subject). What makes for her power is, on the contrary, her
triumphal indifference, her triumphal lack of subjectivity. She
remains mistress of the game; the object remains master of the
game and only reinforces its ironic sovereignty.

You insult her by being too attentive to games of modesty and
wit, just as you insult a child by being too sensitive to its age or
strength. The child, deep down, knows he is not a child. And he
is not concerned with the affectation of liberty and responsibility
with which you wish to dignify him in order better to dignify the
pedagogical difference between adult and child. He competes
rather on equal terms. He is neither free nor inferior, and leaves it
to others to believe that. He envelopes you with his shamelessness,
for which precisely all means are justified. He can choose to play
up difference, to play the fragile child facing the adult; and you
then owe it to him to protect him, to valorize him, to attenuate
the difference. Or else at any moment he can choose to return you
to the absence of difference, real and fundamental (childhood
doesn’t exist; there is no child). He would be right in both cases.
This confers upon him an absolute superiority.

In the same way the woman can always choose to abandon
herself as a sexual object and to give herself without scruples
(which always profoundly surprises the man), or to play at being

The Object and Its Destiny / 157

recognized as a subject, at letting herself be seduced, but refusing
indefinitely, and so on. She can always abandon one role for
another, without, for all that, becoming hysterical or capricious or
whatnot: this is not psychology, it is strategy—which here also
confers upon her an absolute superiority over the man.

Everyone gets off in his or her own way. The very possibility
of sexuality rests on the fact that each of us is ignorant of how the
other comes (or even if). This is a vital misunderstanding, one
could say. It’s the biological form of the secret. There exist other
mysterious manifestations, but this one, this enigma, shines
resplendently in the firmament of sexuality: the jouissance of the
other escapes us. Therefore, there is no possession, for we wouldn’t
possess the other unless we felt their orgasm.

Fortunately it is so, for this is how the woman can eternally
seduce us, by means of this hidden jouissance, which thus becomes
an incalculable pleasure.

The wonderful story of Tiresias! Between two copulating snakes,
he was able to tell the male from the female. He would be a man,
then a woman. And he would say afterwards that the woman has
nine times the pleasure of the man. For this indiscretion he was to
be blinded by Hera, and would receive the gift of clairvoyance.

Must we betray the secret of the climax? To whom is it granted
to pass from one sex to the other, not by surgical operation, but
by a metamorphosis of the orgasm? And who could still be able to
talk about it?

Happily there exists this absolute singularity, the mythical
orgasm of the other, to found sexual difference. That is why it is
an enigma, and it is for having resolved this enigma, for having
passed on the other side of sex, that Tiresias, like Oedipus, will be

158 / Fatal Strategies

condemned to blindness—he could also have been transformed
into a hermaphroditic tree. Not for having betrayed the secret (?)
of the feminine orgasm, for the latter does not exist: the multi¬
plication by nine of feminine jouissance is only the ironic
multiplication of the man’s desire. It bears witness to the fact that
the woman is only the ironic ecstasy of the man’s desire.

Who would worry about that? The only worrisome thing is
what distances us from this enigmatic difference and pulls us
toward the sharing of the pleasure, therefore towards indifference.
Therein lies the whole misunderstanding about sexual liberation.

But in the end the greatest singularity is to be found not on
the side of orgasm, but in this more extraordinary rapport of
seduction. It alone leads to this strange situation: making of the
opposite sex a destiny, making of it not a final object (of orgasm)
but a fatal object (of death and metamorphosis). Because seduc¬
tion plays on a register incomparable to anatomical (or
psychological) difference. Because it pushes the game of difference
to the point of challenge and absolute attraction, to a vertigo
where it is no longer a question of who comes nine times more
than the other because it is a vertigo from raising the stakes and
not from accounting. Because here the bets are placed according
to a higher set of rules, which may not have any ends, and certainly
no computation of pleasures (a computation is forced to stop
somewhere). Seduction alone can put an end to the domination of
one sex over the other.

The dream in love would be to become a woman. The pro¬
found fantasy of physical and mental love is one not of possession
but of metamorphosis, of sexual transfiguration. At the high point
in lovemaking we’re haunted by the enigma of the opposite sex.
All copulation aims only at that: to touch upon the other sex as

The Object and Its Destiny / 159

upon adversity, to integrate it by divination. An insoluble dream
that exhausts itself in the possession of all women, continuously.

But how is it for women? Apparently they do not dream of
being men. They do not have this weakness. They are not con¬
sumed by curiosity about the other sex, rather they faint rather
into their own, by effusion or hysteria, in a rapport with the body
which implies no mystery for themselves, but a meticulous affec¬
tion and attention. Makeup, narcissism, seduction, attraction,
hysteria: sacred forms of concupiscence, transitory and hallowed
forms of concupiscence that the woman constitutes at every
moment for herself. By all the care that she takes, she metamor¬
phoses constantly into herself. What remains for the man but to
seek through her this power of metamorphosis?

He is himself bound to sexual difference. All the drama of
difference is on the side of the man; all the charm of difference is
on the side of the woman. No misery, no oppression of the woman
will ever depreciate this supremely unequal destiny, that will
always swing the balance of dream, obsession, enigma, and
strategem to the side of the sex that prefers itself and thus delin¬
eates that deliciously empty hollow—that of pleasure—where the
other comes to lose himself.

What Tiresias’s story tells us is that what we dream of most
profoundly is not sex but the reversibility of the sexes, the ability
to see sex from both sides, just as the clairvoyant or prophet
(Tiresias) is able to see the two sides of time. We dream of a state
of clairvoyance which is that of the mastery and reversibility of
time, just as we dream of a state of sexual pleasure that would be
a state of mastery over the reversibility of sex.

The supreme orgasm is metamorphosis.

160 / Fatal Strategies

The Gray Imminence

A strange pride obliges us not only to possess the other, but also to
force out his secret, not only to be precious to him, but to be fatal.
The voluptuousness of the gray imminence: the art of making the
other disappear. A whole ceremony is required for this.

First follow people you meet in the street, at random, for an
hour, two hours, brief sequences, disorganized—with the idea
that people’s lives are arbitrary trajectories, directionless, going
nowhere, and that for this very reason they are fascinating. The
network of the other is used as a means of absenting yourself
from yourself. You exist only in the other’s trace, but without
his knowledge; in fact you follow your own trace almost without
knowing it yourself. It is therefore not in order to discover
something about the other, nor about where he’s going, nor a
“drift” in quest of some random aleatory course: all this, which
corresponds to various contemporary ideologies, isn’t particu¬
larly seductive, whereas this enterprise itself depends entirely
upon seduction.

You seduce yourself into being no more than the mirror of the
other, who doesn’t know it—just like Kierkegaard’s mirror sus¬
pended on the opposite wall: the young lady doesn’t think about
it, but the mirror does. You seduce yourself into being the destiny
of the other, the double of his course, which for him has meaning,
but which, duplicated, no longer has any. It’s as if someone,
behind him, knew that he was going nowhere. This is somehow
stealing his objective from him: an evil genie comes and slips subtly
between him and it. This is so magnetic that people often sense
they are being followed, through a sort of intuition that something
has entered their space and has altered its curve.

The Object and Its Destiny / 161

One day S. decides to add another dimension to this “experi¬
ence.” She learns that a man whom she barely knows, from having
followed him once by chance, is taking a trip to Venice. She decides
to follow him all through his voyage. Once in Venice, she explores
a hundred hotels, and finally locates the one where he’s staying. She
rents a room with a window opposite so as to be able to follow his
comings and goings. She has binoculars and a camera, and she pho¬
tographs him on each occasion, the places he has gone, the objects
he has touched. She expects nothing from him. She doesn’t want to
know him. She is not particularly attracted to him. It’s Carnival
time in Venice. Since he might be able to recognize her (they once
talked), she becomes a blond (she has been a brunette). She puts on
makeup and disguises herself. But the pleasures of Carnival do not
interest her; everything is a function of shadowing him. She spends
two whole weeks, at the price of incalculable effort, in keeping on
his trail. She manages to find out about his plans, by questioning
people in the shops where he goes, and about what seats he has
reserved for the theatre. Even the time of his return train to Paris,
where, having taken the preceeding train, she will be waiting for
him when he gets off, in order to take a last picture of him.

No, not the last. She doesn’t abandon the trail, and contacts
people who work with him, a writer with whom he’s going to
collaborate as a photographer. But things turn out badly. Two or
three times he has noticed her following him; there was an incident
in Venice. In Paris it’s even more serious; he becomes violent. The
charm is lost and she gives up.

Deep down, did she want him to kill her or, finding the shad¬
owing intolerable (especially since she has expected nothing, much
less a sexual adventure), did she want him to throw himself upon
her to do her violence? Or that turning on her, like Orpheus leading

162 / Fatal Strategies

Eurydice back from Hell, he might make her suddenly disappear?
Did she simply want to be his destiny, or want him to become hers?
Like all games, this one had its fundamental rule: nothing was to
happen that might have created a contact or a relation between
them. That was the price of the seduction. The secret must not be
lifted, under penalty of falling into cliche.

Of course there is something murderous about this for some¬
one who is being followed. He can take umbrage over it, feel
persecuted, become paranoid. But that was not S’s goal (even if
this fantasy could be aroused sometimes during the course of the
days and hours; but she also takes a risk: the other could reverse
the situation, having sensed the strategem, go after her, obliging
her to accept his terms—he is no victim, he is as strong as she is).
No, the murder is subtler: it consists, as you follow someone step
by step, of erasing his trace as you go. Now no one can live with¬
out leaving a trace. This is what makes anyone who is being
followed turn around after a certain time. Even without clues, how
could he not have a presentiment of the spell that surrounds him?
The gray, or blonde, eminence that is following him leaves no
trace, but she steals his trace from him. She photographs him
incessantly. Photography here has no perverse or archival function.
It simply says: here, at such an hour, at such a place, under such a
light there was someone. And it says simultaneously: it made no
sense to be here, at such a place and moment—in fact, there was
no one—and I, who followed him, can guarantee no one was
there. These are not the snapshot memories of a presence, but
shots of an absence—that of the person followed, of the follower,
and even of their absence from each other.

“Follow me instead,” said another to whom she had spoken of
her shadowing, “I’m more interesting to follow than the housewife

The Object and Its Destiny / 163

next door.” But this is a misinterpretation, and confuses interest
with a higher degree of seduction. It is uninteresting to find out
that someone is leading a double life, for example, except for the
little flavor of strangeness it might lend them. The important thing
is that it is being followed itself that is the double life of the other.
Anyone’s banal existence can be transformed, but anyone’s excep¬
tional life can be made banal by this act. Once again, it’s not a
matter of persecution, but of seduction.

The Duke of Palagonia also understood how to warp the fatal
shadow of deforming mirrors. This noble Spaniard, deformed and
monstrous, built in the vicinity of Palermo a villa in his own
image, peopled with gnomes, surrounded with convex mirrors, so
that the most beautiful girl in Sicily, whom he had married,
should think of herself as ugly, and therefore be resigned to love
him who resembled her.

Or does he assure power for himself by inventing a world of
lubricious forms (ugliness is lewd), where beauty would be caught
out of defiance, out of weakness, because its perfection is intolerable?

That is probably the secret of all seduction: it offers beauty a
deforming mirror where it is finally liberated from its perfection.
More generally, it offers the other a strange mirror where it is
finally liberated from its being, its liberty, its image, its resem¬
blance—all things that in the secrecy of the self weigh heavily upon
one. God himself is seduced by the devil.

Is there a secret of the Villa Palagonia? No, beauty wants some¬
thing worse than itself, it wants to be sequestered, raped, tortured
(the Christ in the chapel himself floats hanging by the shoulders,
suspended from the vault like a stuffed bird). The first one who
presents himself will seduce her by monstrosity.

164 / Fatal Strategies

But not the first to come along. The Duke of Palagonia had a
lofty soul.

The young and beautiful A. is courted by a prince, who, not being
able to see her, writes her every day. She knows nothing of this, for
these letters come to her mother, who responds faithfully for her
and so maintains an amorous conespondance with the prince. A.
will find out the truth, along with all the letters and answers, later,
after the mother’s death, among her papers. And she will not hate
her for this. This betrayal, on the contrary, absolutely dazzles her
posthumously.

A. possesses only the spontaneous charm of seduction, and there
is no mystery in the princes attraction to her. But the fatal power,
the one which holds the secret, the symbolic power (aesthetic,
Kierkegaard would say) of seduction, the true seducer, is the mother.

She is the one who reflects, intercepts and distills the seduction
of her daughter without her knowledge. This ignorance is essential;
it is the fundamental rule. Only the other knows that you are a
queen; only the other knows that you are loved, that you are going
nowhere, that your life is senseless. He somehow shadows you,
sneaks your raison d’etre, and thus obliges you to exist, through this
subversion, more intensely than if he engendered you.

This story is beautiful for the incestuous shadow it projects,
but we need to rid it of all Oedipal foolishness about incest. Seduc¬
ing what one has engendered is, in its banal version, crime par
excellence. But in a deeper order of things, incest is natural and
required. One must seduce what one has produced and engen¬
dered. On the contrary, it is perhaps the fact of being engendered
and engendering that is the crime above all others, and that which
must be resolved, redeemed, expiated by the initiatory fact of

The Object and Its Destiny / 165

seducing and being seduced. And this seduction is always more or
less incestuous because, like incest, it is an esoteric form: it consists
in having you enter into the secret, and not only into life; it con¬
sists in giving you a destiny, and not only an existence.

It is thus that the mother redeems, in a way, this secret inter¬
vention, the fact of having brought her daughter into the world.
That is why the story of the secret destiny that the mother had
given her is so beautiful, like another life she might have given in
addition to the first.

Incest does not proceed from some desire, from the interdic¬
tion of desire; it does not proceed from a natural or antinatural
instinct; there is nothing libidinal about it. But neither can it be the
basis for the law or the symbolic order. It expresses the fundamen¬
tal rule that all that has been produced must be seduced (initiated into
disappearance after having been initiated into existence). It is for
this that we exert ourselves in every possible way. We are called
upon at every moment to seduce (that is, to lure to immolate and
to destroy, to subvert and to ravish ) that which the law summons
us to produce. The law imposes production upon us, but the secret
rule, never spoken, hidden behind the law, imposes seduction upon
us, and that rule is stronger than the law.

Destiny is profiled only in this enigmatic conjuncture: my secret is
elsewhere. No one holds the key to his own secret—this is the error
of all psychology, including that of the unconscious. All that is
linked outside of myself (in dream or language as well as in event
or catastrophe), all of this constitutes for me a fatal object—even if
it doesn’t bring on death, it implies a dispossession of the subject,
draws him into the secret, beyond his own end, in spite of himself,
outside of himself, there also in a kind of ecstasy.

166 / Fatal Strategies

I his is the enigma: how can one be in on the secret without
knowing it? The enigmatic resolution is this: only the other knows,
God alone knows, destiny alone knows. The secret is what
envelopes you without your knowing it.

So in A.’s story. A. is in on the secret, she has a secret destiny,
but she doesn’t know it. There is no risk of her betraying it: only
her mother knows.

In certain cases it is only language that knows. It is in language
alone that the ironic and fatal chain is linked.

As in Alphonse Allais’s story, Only in Paris. Two young people, two
young lovers, each receive an anonymous letter, denouncing to each
of them the infidelity of the other. If the woman wants proof she has
only to go to a certain masked ball; her lover will be there, disguised
as Harlequin. The other receives the same secret advice. Go to this
certain ball, your wife will be there, disguised as a Congolese boat¬
man. On the evening in question, in the middle of the ball, two
people sit, off to the side. Finally, he advances towards her and
invites her to go off with him, to a private little room where they
throw themselves upon each other to tear off the masks. And, as the
story tells it, to their stupefaction, it was neither one nor the other!

All the illogical charm of the story is in the movement where
the two rush to raise their masks and there’s nothing behind them.
As if the two masks (Harlequin and Boatman) were acting on their
own, looking to remarry each other, as a function of a pure inertia
of language, of the tale, while they have no reason for doing so.
(But by what miracle do they find themselves there, by what
uncanny conjuncture, and where are the two others, the real ones,
during this time?) The real is out, only the appearances function,
and they combine according to their own logic, where logic should

The Object and Its Destiny / 167

have forever separated them: such is the game of pure appearance.
This is exactly the function of wit. For precisely in the Witz* the
word becomes a line—no longer a carrier sign but a pure vector of
appearance. Fragments of language unknown to each other, without
causal links, meet there as if by enchantment and discover with delight
that they were “neither one nor the other. ” The terms tear off each
others masks, but do not recognize each other.

Of course all of this is connected to language’s possibility of
continuing on the thrust of the real (to make it seem like some¬
thing is there to be represented) and then to collide with pure
appearance, that is to say, to continue to function beyond its end.
Which allows Allais to slip in this little phrase: “...and it was
neither one nor the other”—which is made possible as a logical
utterance by the very functioning, mad and fantastic, of language
alone—unintelligible to reason. Now all the vertigo resides in this
little phrase. The story could easily be told without it: the two
lovers recognize each other and fall into each other’s arms, recon¬
ciled—that supplies a spicy and edifying story, in the style of the
sentimental eighteenth century (in the image of Sade’s novella,
where a transvestite seduces a woman he believes to be a transves¬
tite—but both are homosexuals. Disappointment at the moment
of the respective discovery of their sexes, but with sex you always
wind up managing somehow). You might also suppose that one of
the two would really be himself, and the other would not be the
other: that would be a gallant tale. But it wouldn’t be a seductive one.

With Allais the strongest part lies in the conclusion, when he
says that since this episode, they have never again had any married
couples’ spats”—letting it be understood that this pure effect of
fiction and unreality had some consequences on the level of the
real, letting hover just the shadow of the dizzying hypothesis

168 / Fatal Strategies

that “all the same it was really them” (otherwise there could be
no consequences).

Furthermore who could know “it was neither one nor the
other,” since no one was there to recognize it? They (the two real
characters) do not even know that they are not there, but language
itself knows it, and it alone knows it. Exactly like in Kierkegaards
mirror: “A mirror is hanging on the wall opposite her—she doesn’t
think about this at all, but the mirror thinks about it.”

In order for there to be seduction, signs or words must thus func¬
tion without knowing it, as in the Witz*. Things must be absent
from themselves, and words must be meaningless. But the characters
cannot know even this (only language knows)—as in the case of S.,
where the one who shadows is alone in knowing that the other is
going nowhere, or inversely, as in Death at Samarkand, where he who
thinks he’s escaping, no matter where, is mistaken, because the other,
Death, knows where he’s going and waits for him there.

In this sense, by an unexpected detour, it could be that Allais’
conclusion isn’t so absurd as it seems (that the two young lovers
would never again have those “married couples’ spats”!). We must
admit into the order of events what we can easily verify in the order
of language: when two words, two signs, seduce each other, even
without their knowing it, in the unfolding of language (Witz?), this
seduction, as unique as it is, has dazzling effects* on the entire
sentence and on the whole effect of communication. Nothing
prevents, therefore, the seductive conjunction of just the masks
alone, in this unintelligible episode, from having on the real lovers
some positive consequence. Somehow, they found and seduced
each other again. Somehow, whatever happens on the level of the
pure appearance of the tale always impinges on the real. We can ask
no more of language. Once magic asked this of it—and got it.

The Object and Its Destiny / 169

It’s not enough for a story to be illogical and meaningless to be
seductive; it is still necessary that this be signaled in an unintelligi¬
ble way. And so Allais’s story isn’t soluble in logical terms, but not
any more so in terms of chance or probability, either (there is no
chance that such an event could occur by chance). Nothing can be
articulated in it; there is no solution, but this ironic and unexpect¬
ed linkage of language is itself necessary. Which makes the
irresolution stunning, instead of being banal, since it is the opera¬
tion of a pure sign. There lies the prestige of illusion.

This is also the way those little phrases operate that come to us
from somewhere else. According to Canetti:

“We never forget these phrases. They probably take from us an
innocence that could be very pleasant to keep. But through these
cruel breaks a man is initiated into his own nature. Without them
he could never really see himself. They must intervene by surprise,
must come from the outside. Any phrase that comes to us from
elsewhere is efficacious because it is unexpected: we have nothing
to counterbalance it with. We help it with an energy identical to
that with which we would have opposed it in other circumstances.”

These little phrases are the opposite of those banal ones where
we recognize ourselves, of those phrases that make us ashamed,
where suddenly the subject becomes ashamed of what he is. Instead
of which these little fatal phrases are like the eruption of a pure
unidentified object that renders the subject unidentifiable to him¬
self. Nothing in the subject can counterbalance the efficacy of these
phrases, since they no longer serve as mirror and he can no longer
exercise, as he can on others, his flattery on them. Suddenly all the
energy with which he ordinarily would have opposed them finds
itself transferred and thrown back upon them. The irruption of the
pure object inverts all rapports: the object becomes powerful with

170 / Fatal Strategies

all the power ol the subject. All our energy is ravished from us,
instantaneously diverted by this object come from elsewhere. We
accept it willingly; we are ourselves ravished by this “cruel break” in
the order of things, by this unexpected revolution, by this turn¬
about of energy and the inversion of the poles of power.

The Crystal Revenge

Psychoanalysis has privileged one aspect of our lives and hidden
another. It has overestimated one of our births—the biological and
genital one—and has forgotten the other—the initiatic birth. It has
forgotten that if two beings are there presiding at our biological
birth, it always happens that others seduce you (they may even be
the same ones), and these others are in a sense our initiatic parents.
This second birth redeems the first one, along with all the Oedipal
conflicts so well described by psychoanalysis, but which really
concern only the first birth.

This first birth imposes a history upon us, necessarily an
Oedipal one. A history of repression and unconscious work, a
psychological history of complexes and mourning, of the always
altered and mortifying rapports with the Father, the Law, and the
Symbolic Order. What psychoanalysis has not seen is that what
happens to us is always fortunately something else, an event without
precedent that inaugurates not a history but a destiny, and which,
because it is without precedent, liberates us from this genesis and
this history. This event without precedent is seduction; it is also
without origin, coming from somewhere else and arriving always
unexpectedly—a pure event that erases in one fell swoop all
conscious and unconscious determination.

The Object and Its Destiny / 171

We were all once produced, we must all be seduced. That is
the only true “liberation,” that which opens beyond the Oedipus
complex and the Law, and which delivers us from a stern psycho¬
logical calvary as well as from the biological fatality of having been
sexually engendered.

The only invalids are those sick from seduction. Precisely the
ones to whom this event without precedent did not happen, those
that have never known this second, initiatory birth and who, for
this reason, remain strapped in their Oedipal history and destined
for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis takes them on the basis of an
economy of desire, that is to say, of a refusal of seduction, within
whose wails psychoanalysis has helped not a little to enclose them.

For it is from psychoanalysis (though not only from it, of
course) that this inconceivable hallucination of the individual
about his own desire proceeds. As Monique Schneider has shown
in her book, Freud and Pleasure, it is psychoanalysis which, at the
end of the “psychological revolution” of the nineteenth century,
succeeded in this mad substitution of an individual psychic econ¬
omy, of a libido, of one’s own desire, and the Oedipal reversals of
this desire at the event come from elsewhere, for the initiatory,
seductive, and fatal incidence of the other as an event without
precedent, for the surprise, for the coincidence of the world and the
signs that make you not a subject but a preferred object of election
and seduction.

What makes you exist is not the force of your desire (wholly a
nineteenth-century imaginary of energy and economy), but the
play of the world and seduction; it is the passion of playing and
being played, it is the passion of illusion and appearance, it is that
which comes from elsewhere, from others, from their face, their
language, their gestures—and that which bothers you, lures you,

172/ Fatal Strategies

summons you into existence; it is the encounter, the surprise of
what exists before you, outside of you, without you —the marvelous
exteriority of the pure object, of the pure event, of what happens
without your having anything to do with it. What a relief—this
alone is enough to seduce you; we’ve been so solicited to be the
cause of everything, to find a cause for everything. Mineral object,
solstice event, sensual object, desert form—all these are seductive
because they have nothing to do with our economy of desire and
because, basically, being doesn’t give a damn about its own being;
it is nothing, and exists only when it is lifted out of itself, into the
play of the world and the vertigo of seduction.

It’s against all this that psychoanalysis takes a stand when it
forms the hypothesis of an exterior world as aggression, of the ego
as a system of defense and investment, of pleasure as resolution of
tensions. The whole problem for Freud was how to destroy the wild
event of seduction.

It is a paradoxical situation for analysis when it refers to dream
material, for precisely in this fatal perspective the dream is event,
while in analysis it is no more than a symptom. The same is true
for madness, neurosis, and the parapraxis: everywhere psycho¬
analysis has missed their irruptive, illusive, seductive power,
bypassed them as facts and made of them mere symptoms, strip¬
ping all sovereignty from the irruption of things, from the magic of
appearances, and from the challenge they imply, pushed them back
to the particular subject of interpretation. Against all of this psy¬
choanalysis has hoisted its desiring subject, its Robinson Crusoe of
the unconscious, sworn to an insular economy and to the exorcism
of all external aggression. Even the very conception of the outside
world as a source of disequilibrium and of the internal drive itself as
a threat of rupture is symptomatic: the only destiny of the subject

The Object and Its Destiny / 173

should be to discharge its tensions, to purge itself of its internal
excitations, to neutralize the irruption of demonic forces that con¬
tinually threaten the psychological fortress with disintegration. It’s
no longer even a destiny of drives, but a destiny of expulsion. Like
Ulysses, closed off from any incantation by outside forms, the sub¬
ject’s only task will be to liberate itself from its instinctual energy,
in a defensive organization sworn to pleasure as a principle (!) and
to death as resolution—even to the death drive itself as a way to get
rid of these tensions.

Monique Schneider shows how Freud the theorist recants
before the first assaults of seduction (of the concept of seduction),
glimpsed for a moment by organizing the psychic apparatus of psy¬
choanalysis, itself centered on a whole individual protected from
the very beginning—a pure instinctual enclosure destined to
administer its own desire, to distribute its investments, to invent its
object relations, to fantasize about its image—that is, a being for
whom everything will basically happen from the inside, in an
essentially individual process, and nothing from the outside, in a
dual process.

For Oedipus to return to Thebes and to the Oedipal problem¬
atic (sleeping with his mother, going blind as symbolic castration,
etc.), the Sphinx has to be dead, which means an end has to be put
to seduction and its vertigo, to the enigma and secret, in favor of a
hidden history whose drama lies entirely in repression and whose
key is in interpretation (while the enigma is never to be revealed, it
seduces by way of a secret intelligibility which is on the order of
divination); an end must be put to the seductive enigma, in favor
of deadly truth.

Similarly, for Freud to enter upon the royal and Oedipal road of
psychoanalytic interpretation, for him to enter into the kingdom of

174 / Fatal Strategies

the unconscious, for him to sleep with psychoanalysis, with conse¬
quences in the end as dramatic for us as those of Oedipus’s adventure
for his people, he too had to put an end to seduction, had to kill the
enigmatic beast, the Sphinx of appearances, that forbade the entry of
“psychic reality.” Freud privately perpetuates this execution of the
seductress “in the wish either to raze or to entomb inside the self a
maternal archaic seduction, Sphinx, witch or perverse nurse.”

However, Monique Schneider, if she clearly points out this
inaugural exorcism of psychoanalysis and how the whole Freudian
edifice is constructed on this conjuration of seduction, here only
substitutes the murder of the Mother for that of the Father, in the
sense that for her seduction is never anything but that of the archaic
Mother, of the devouring seductress, of the fusional womb.
Seduction reduced to the seductress, and she in turn to the
womans, and the womb’s, unfathomable power of absorption. This
is the dirty trick played by modern feminism, itself misled by psy¬
choanalysis: to resuscitate the feminine as a dangerous, archaic,
fusional power is in some sense to side with Freud, whose purpose
is to bar the Mother’s power of absorbing desire by the Name of the
Father. If seduction is a matter only of fusion, then we might as
well have the Oedipal complex as well as the Law. That kind of
seduction is really nothing but seduction seen through the prism of
the Oedipal complex and the Law, like a sort of spectrum of dia¬
bolical, incestuous temptation. Like Jocasta, who—once the real
figure of seduction, the enigmatic Sphinx, has been destroyed and
immolated—will be reincarnated, but for the worse, so to speak, in
a universe corrupted by the Oedipal complex, vengeance and the
backfire of seduction. But it is no longer the same figure; that of the
Sphinx is dual and enigmatic; the other, that of Jocasta, is maternal
and incestuous, archaic and fusional.

The Object and Its Destiny / 175

Seduction is quite a different thing from this devouring mother
that Freud had such good reasons to fear. If psychoanalysis (the Law,
the Father, etc.) is what tears you from the Mothers desire for fusion
and returns you to the sovereignty of your own desire, seduction is
what tears you from your own desire to return you to the sovereignty
of the world. It’s what tears beings from the psychological sphere of
fantasy, repression, the primal scene, to return them to the vertiginous
and superficial play of appearances. It’s what tears beings away from
the reign of metaphor to return them to that of metamorphoses. It is
what tears beings and things from the reign of interpretation to return
them to divination. It has an initiatory form, and it restores to signs
their power. It cannot therefore coexist with a discipline that can give
signs only a meaning, and an unhappy one at that.

Dreams, however, are something other than mere “material.”
They charm, and are charmingly prophetic before they disappear
into interpretation, where of course they take on the meaning they
are supposed to. Then they are no longer seductive, nor fatal;
they’ve become significant. Dreams used to have a secret; Freud
gave them a sense. Dreams used to be closer to destiny; with Freud
they approach desire. But they lose this enchantment (even a
wicked one), giving way to the work of the unconscious. The play
of the dream as appearance allowed us to find there not uncon¬
scious and metaphorical pathways, but effects of seduction, the
trajectory of an order of events of which the dream is a part as in a
story not as a symptom, for then it is only a sign driven toward
its sense. As a pure event the dream has a prophetic quality that
analytical interpretation breaks down, by reducing the dream to an
unconscious economy and topology.

The dream has become psychological, has fallen into the psy¬
chic order. It has lost its own seduction. Like neuroses, like

176/ Fatal Strategies

fantasies, parapraxes, madness, and sickness in general, which psy¬
choanalysis has quarantined in the unconscious and consecrated to
pathology; to all of these interpretation has assigned the vocation
of symptom (and Freud only barely missed wrecking the same
havoc with wit).

“I can stand dreams only when they’re whole, intact and myste¬
rious. They are so weird that we can understand them only very
slowly... Unfortunate would be the madman who understood
them too soon: he would lose them never to find them again.

We should not pile together dreams that have nothing in
common with each other, either. Their importance is exactly
commensurate with their dissemination in reality. The essen¬
tial thing, in any case, is that dreams be realized (which they
no longer are in psychoanalysis, any more than childhood,
and many other things that are no longer called upon to exist
as such). But dreams are realized otherwise than traditional
interpreters imagine them to be. Dreams must animate reality
by penetrating it in every possible way, by coming from all
possible directions, and especially from where we least expect
them. The intangible nevertheless has its form, fashioned by
its insertion into reality, and we shouldn’t impose one on it
from the outside.

The harm done by the interpretation of dreams is
immeasurable. The change is invisible, but a dream is so
sensitive a thing! Only an infinistesimal minority of people
realize what is so special about the dream. Why else would
people dare to keep undressing it until they’ve made it nothing
more than an ordinary truism?”

— Canetti

i he Object and Its Destiny / 177

I think that there’s an essence of the dream, as of all things, that
is to say, an ideal figure whose illusive power has been stolen from
us by psychoanalysis. I think there’s a form of appearance, an ideal
figure of appearance whose power of illusion has been ravished
from us by interpretation.

Psychoanalysis is the bad conscience of the sign. It transforms
every sign into symptom, every act into a slip, every discourse into
hidden meaning, every representation into an hallucination of
desire. This incredible near-sightedness of analytical interpretation!
Against the seductive power of thought, psychoanalysis incarnates
the omnipotence of hidden motives. Suspicion toward appear¬
ances, blackmail by symptom and hidden meaning, the solution of
the enigma: psychoanalysis absolutely participates in the misfor¬
tune, in the bad conscience that Nietzsche identified as the source
of all backward worlds...

But seduction has its way of evening the score. It ironically
refashions the dream, appearing again in the well-known form of
dreams of healing that attempt to seduce the analyst and divert
the analysis. But this is nothing: the resolution of the enigma and
the defeat of the Sphinx will allow all the hidden obscenity of
Oedipal relations to burst out—murder, incest and the final
blindness that always accompanies the unveiling of the truth. We
should never touch upon the enigma, under pain of falling into
obscenity, and Oedipus will have no other resort but to become
blind in order to escape this obscenity. Yes, the Sphinx is avenged:
it’s she who by her death locks Oedipus up into this whole mur¬
derous history, and she who locks up Freud into this whole case
history of castration.

178/ Fatal Strategies

The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence

“Chance tires me.”—God.

“In a remote Yugoslavian valley, it seems they’ve abolished
chance, thanks to a certain throw of the dice.” To which we answer:
any throw of the dice ended chance long ago.

Two hypotheses about chance. First: all things are called to
meet each other, it is only by chance that they don’t. Second: all
things are scattered and indifferent to each other; it is only by
chance that they meet once in a while.

This last hypothesis is commonly held; the other one, para¬
doxically, is the more interesting.

At all events there remains, in the commonly held version, a pro¬
found ambiguity: is it chance that keeps things in a state of aleatory
dispersion (this corresponds to its definition), or is it what causes
them to meet up from time to time? We would be happy to have it
both ways. Things happen by chance, and chance causes them to
meet. This is purely illogical. Does chance reveal the sovereign indif¬
ference of things to each other, or does it betray a secret will, a kind
of evil genie that would take pleasure in unusual conjugations?

The solution might be this latter: modern analysis long ago
brought to light the flaws of a determinist explanation of the world
and gave birth to an aleatory world at the expense of objective
causality; it has therefore stimulated everywhere a vision in terms
of chance, and at the same time it’s awakened people to other con¬
nections, noncausal and more secret (psychoanalysis, for example,
and its unconscious interpretation, have eliminated the element of
chance in slips, failures, dreams, and madness). More enigmatic,
another necessity has appeared, and nothing in principle can escape
it: whether psychological or structural predestination, the deep

The Object and Its Destiny / 179

order of things is unconscious, but its decrees eliminate chance
nonetheless. We have thus substituted, for the reign of intelligible
causes, not really chance, but a mechanism of more mysterious
linkages. Chance would then correspond not to a temporary inca¬
pacity of science to explain everything—in that case it would still
have a palpable conceptual existence—but to the passing from a
state of causal determination to another order, radically different,
also of non-chance.

There’s another problem, too. For there to be chance (in the
second sense, at least) there must be coincidence: two series have to
intersect, two events, two individuals, two particles must meet.
Even if the probability of this occurrence is infinitesimal, there
must be a possibility for this conjunction to take place, in the same
sense that, for there to be causality, there must be some contiguity
of cause and effect. Now, this postulate is never certain. But it’s not
certain either that the encounter is impossible —unless in a world
given over to a pure power relationship, where things, bodies, indi¬
viduals, events can touch each other, bump and run into each other
because they’ve lost this “aura” that normally envelopes them and
forbids all promiscuity. In a sacred, ceremonial universe, things do
not touch each other, and they never meet. They link up without
fail, but without contact. Tact in this matter is precisely avoiding
contact. Remark how ceremonial gestures, dress, and bodies roll,
intertwine, brush past each other, challenge one another, but
without ever touching. No chance, that is, no slip that would hurl
the bodies toward each other, no disorder that would suddenly
allow things the liberty of confusion.

The same is true of our bodies and daily lives. We had to break
up this aura that surrounds acts and bodies for them to be able to
meet by chance in the street, concentrate in such great number in

180 / Fatal Strategies

cities or camps, draw close or melt into each other in love. A very
powerful force was required to break this magnetic distance where
each body moves, as well as to produce this indifferent space
where chance is able to put them in contact. Something of this
refractory power remains in each of us, even at the heart of the
modern secularized spaces, even in the use we make of our eman¬
cipated, spatially liberated bodies. Something comparable in
power to the taboo that averted all promiscuity, to the distinction
that condemned all fortuitous meeting, all fusion or confusion
due to chance. Chance is only the freedom that bodies have—like
particles at the microscopic level—to move in any direction in
an undifferentiated space. And this freedom implies that for
every being an inviolable space, from a symbolic point of view,
is unclean and obscene. (This has nothing to do with any kind
of Puritanism, but really with the sovereign space necessary for
the very movement of bodies.) Chance, therefore, along with the
statistical probability that characterizes our modern world, are
unclean and obscene modalities. Right now we must accomodate
all of this in the name of freedom; but one day, this refusal—this
untying that makes multiple meetings possible, accelerating the
Brownian movement of our lives—will return with a deadly inde¬
termination and indifference, and overwhelm us. Chance not only
tires God, it tires us too.

Western materialism works on the hypothesis that the world is
brute matter, subject to aleatory and disorganized movements. Our
world’s “primitive scene” is that which would remain lifeless if
some God did not come along to breathe soul, or sense, or energy
into it. This is a disorder that God alone can cure, by imposing
order, tearing the world away from a state of original chaos.

The Object and Its Destiny / 181

“Chance contained order, and when order came it allowed a
place in creation for chance.” (A. Verdet)

The problem has always been to create order out of supposed
disorder, to produce and support movement, to sustain and pro¬
duce meaning. This is what haunts us; it is our ideal, as well as the
profile of our catastrophe (entropy).

The idea that we achieve a few rational moments in this world
of ours only at the price of perpetual effort, that we have to be con¬
stantly on guard against a lapse into nothingness—this hypothesis
is functionally pessimist and desperate. Even God has had enough
of it. “Chance tires God”, says a theologian on the subject of mak¬
ing gambling illegal. God himself is fed up with fighting against
chance (recently, moreover, he’s lowered his flags, allowing an
openly random vision of the world to dominate). There is no other
end for something that’s begun this way. If you suppose that an
energy is necessary to fill the universe, to create meaningful con¬
nections, fragile islands of antichance, then sooner or later this
energy will fail. Even God won’t be strong enough to resist the ulti¬
mate annihilation of meaning. Anyone would have given up on
this; He himself has stopped fighting it, effacing himself before the
irruption of a meaningless universe. God is not scandalized, ulcer¬
ated or threatened by chance; He’s tired of it. Marvellous!

But you might adopt the opposite hypothesis. God has not
grown tired of struggling against chance; rather, he is fatigued
with having to reproduce it. It’s God himself who’s trapped in this
eternal task, for the truth is that there is no chance. If chance had
to be created, only a god could do it, for it’s a superhuman job.

Creating chance, so that everything doesn’t always connect
necessarily and without discontinuity: whether lucky or unlucky,
this would be intolerable for man. Creating chance, so that people

182 / Fatal Strategies

can play and believe in fortune and misfortune, which lessens
their guilt.

The vital importance of this belief in the possibility of the
purely accidental occurrence, which would therefore be insignifi¬
cant, indifferent, and irresponsible! For example: the death of a
friend, a reversal in fortune, a natural catastrophe. What if these
things—outside of the fact that “they never happen just by
themelves”—should be moreover attributable to a will, to an
objective or subjective malignity, even God’s? What a weight, what
a burden, what an increase in responsibility and fault! And where
would there be room for an innocent expectation of the future?

Primitives believed in a world of this kind, a world of the
omnipotent thought and will, without the shadow of a chance. But
they lived really in magic and cruelty. Chance lets us breathe: no one
wanted it to happen, what a consolation! So it is God, in his
immense pity, who has granted us chance. We often say, of an event
that we want to be rid of, “God willed it.” (That is to say, no one.)
But God has grown tired, in the end, from having willed it, and it
is quite possible that once in a while he withdraws his will and leaves
the world prey to the law of things, that is, to total predestination.

Chance is attributable to a God even more extraordinary
than the one who manages everything with his will, than the one
of universal predestination or the providential and fateful linking
of everything. Nothing is easier for things than to connect, to
metamorphose one into the other. To prevent that—to obtain a
purely accidental world—we need to suppose an infinite will and
energy. God himself would never get through with this fantastic
labor of isolating every particle, of abolishing all sequence, all
scattered seductions, to maintain the absolute reign of chance.
What artifice is involved in chance, and how small was the

The Object and Its Destiny / 183

probability that it could ever come to exist (as unlikely as the
probability of God’s existence)!

God—our old rational and rationalist God—is evidently inca¬
pable of managing the course of things. His raison d’etre is to
guarantee, to bless certain causal connections, allowing him to
make a last judgement on the world, piercing through, at certain
places, the fog that obscures his luminous gaze upon chaos, so that
some kind of minimal distinction can be made between Good and
Evil. And the Devil is constantly threatening to confuse these
tedious labors. Seduction is operating ceaselessly to blur this sepa¬
ration of Good from Evil. Its no surprise that God has died,
leaving behind a perfecty free and random world, and leaving the
task of organizing things to a blind divinity named Chance.

God scarcely held up his side of the bargain. He—who was
supposed to be there in order to be the cause of everything—ended
up arranging things so that what happens without reason, what
arrives through an extremely rare and unlikely probability, is more
meaningful than what happens as a result of a cause. What happens
accidentally takes on a meaning and intensity that we no longer
assign to rational occurrence. In an overdetermined world, chance
is the creator of special effects.

Chance itself is a special effect; it assumes in imagination the
perfection of the accident (as, in a series of objects, only the missing
one is especially precious). We live in a paradoxical world, where
the accidental thing is more meaningful, more charming, than
intelligible connections. It is possible that this situation is itself
a matter of conjuncture: the superior charm and meaning that
we find in accident, the ironic and diabolical joy we take in acci¬
dental events, is doubtless equalled only by the pleasure of the
first mind capable of inventing, though in a chaotic world, the

184 / Fatal Strategies

first causal relation. That individual, in his time, was certainly
considered to be the Devil; he must have been burned at the
stake for his trouble.

But all of this is based on the flawed hypothesis of a chaotic
world, one we have to fight against by rational connections.
Whereas the inverse hypothesis is much richer and infinitely more
plausible: that this is a world where there is no such thing as
chance. Nothing is dead, nothing is inert, nothing is disconnected,
uncorrelated or aleatory. Everything, on the contrary, is fatally,
admirably connected—not at all according to rational relations
(which are neither fatal nor admirable), but according to an inces¬
sant cycle of metamorphoses, according to the seductive rapports
of form and appearance. Seen as substance in need of energy, the
world lives in the inert terror of the random, it is shattered by
chance. Seen as the order of appearances and their senseless unrav¬
elling, seen as pure event, the world is, on the contrary, ruled by
absolute necessity. From this angle, everything bursts with con¬
nection, seduction; nothing is isolated, nothing happens by
chance—there is total correlation. The problem would be rather to
brake, to arrest at certain points this total correlation of events, to
stop this vertigo of seduction, of the linking of forms one by the
other, this magic order (for some, disorder) that we see sponta¬
neously arise in the form of linked sequences or coincidences
(lucky or unlucky), or in the form of destiny, or ineluctable con¬
nection, when everything falls into order as if by miracle.

Were all familiar with this experience; it includes writing and
speech. Words have this same tendency, when we allow them their
free play, to assume the order of destiny. All of language can be
engulfed in a single phrase, by an effect of seduction that precipi¬
tates the floating signs toward a central series. We know this chain

The Object and Its Destiny / 185

reaction, we know how undeniably it occurs. We know the strange
familiarity that belongs to things when their course is unimpeded,
when they relate in the pure contiguity of an event. When we don’t
struggle against them with our rational systems and our logical,
goal-oriented constructions, or see in them only the secondary con¬
sequences of a history that’s already taken place.

All of this is close to what Levi-Strauss called, in linguistic
terms, the excess of the signifier—the idea that the signifier is
there from the beginning, spread everywhere, in a profusion that
happily the signified never exhausts. This overabundant order of
the signifier is that of magic (and poetry). It is not an order of
chance or indetermination; far from that, it is rather an arranged
order, a necessity superior to the one which joins the signifier and
the signified (which itself is highly arbitrary). The long work of
joining signifier and signified, the work of reason, somehow
brakes and absorbs this fatal profusion. The magical seduction of
the world must be reduced, annuled. And it will be so the day
when all signifiers receive their signifieds, when all has become
meaning and reality.

This would be, quite obviously, the world’s end. The world will
end—literally—when all seductive rapports yield to rational ones.
This is precisely the catastrophic enterprise on which we are engaged:
resolving all fatality into causality or probability. That is true entropy.
We may wonder if it could ever succeed, but what we should not
doubt is that it is fate, not chance, which is the “natural” course of
things. And that it is destiny—that is to say, the flashing seduction
of forms—that reason seeks to destroy, and not chance, which reason
can very well live with. Remember, chance contained order, and
when order came it left place in creation for chance.

186 / Fatal Strategies

1 he work of reason is not at all to invent connections, relations,
meaning. There’s too much of that already. On the contrary, reason
seeks to manufacture the neutered, to create the indifferent, to
demagnetize inseparable constellations and configurations, to make
them erratic elements sworn finally to finding their cause or to
wandering at random. Reason seeks to break the incessant cycle of
appearances. Chance—the possibility of indeterminate elements,
their respective indifference, and, in a word, their freedom—results
from this dismantling.

In short, the only chance there is is the one we’ve artificially
produced by the liquidation of forms. Chance never existed, espe¬
cially not from the beginning, the way we like to think about it.
Originally, all forms can be explained one by the other, or rather
they necessarily imply one another. There is no void, and for there
to be chance there must be a void: points at which all substance
and form melt together, intervals when there is literally nothing.
And this, for a way of thinking other than our own modern one,
would be unthinkable.

It’s not by chance (!) that chance and the void were discovered
at the same time, in the seventeenth century, with Pascal and Tori-
celli. 7 Modern man literally invented these neutral concepts, these
simulations of absence: chance; emptiness; a world without bond,
form, destiny; a space without content. Two formal abstractions,
bases for a modernity from which fatality and grace began then to
withdraw, leaving the field open for experimental demiurgy and
statistical extermination.

Games of chance paradoxically illustrate this absence of
chance, its radical denial in the very spirit of the player. What the

7. Jacques Brosse, Traverses #23.

The Object and Its Destiny / 187

gambler wants is certainly not to be tuned into the “law” of prob¬
abilities and great numbers. This would hardly be exciting, no
more than any objective sequence. The gambler is rather looking
for chance, but not chance as random effect, punctual and contin¬
gent. He wants chance as a sign of election, as a process of general
seduction, which it is the rule of the game to capture (this has
nothing to do with the laws of probability). The gambler is look¬
ing for chain reaction, charming catastrophe.

All strategy in the sphere of the game is aimed at provoking a
deescalation of rational causes and an inverse escalation of magical
linkage. Not one lucky occasion, then another, throw by throw (the
famous equiprobability of chance at every throw), but on the con¬
trary a fatal sequence of lucky throws (or unlucky throws: what is
essential is not to win but to be fatal, to trap fate in its own game,
where nothing can any longer arrest the production of a world
given up to the pure solicitation of mind). Chance, we know, is
only chance if it snowballs, just like catastrophe; chance has nothing
to do with an objective probability that stops and allows for calcu¬
lation. Chance must be forced , duly solicited, duly seduced. God
can only respond; he can only give you everything. He can only let
things happen according to their destiny, which is to link all forms
(including numbers) together without exception, without accident,
without fail. This is the basic rule of the game, and God himself
is subject to it. This is the basic rule of the world’s secret organi¬
zation, of all the wondrous conjugation of forms according to
destiny. This allows the arbitrary modality of the game (concrete
rules) for ceremonial purposes (and not for contractual purposes,
as in exchanges regulated by law), as a perfectly conventional ritual
where there is reflected—not without a glimmer of irony—the
absolute necessity that underlies hope.

188 / Fatal Strategies

We are all gamblers. What we desire most intensely is that the
inexorable procession of rational connections cease for a while.
That there be installed, even for a short time, an unheard-of unrav¬
elling of another kind, a marvellous escalation of events, an
extraordinary succession, as if predestined, of the smallest details,
to the point where we think that things—until now maintained
artificially at a distance through a contract of succession and causal¬
ity—suddenly find themselves, not delivered over to chance, but
converging spontaneously, concurring through their very connec¬
tion in this selfsame intensity

That gives us pleasure. Those are our real events. This obvious
fact that nothing is neutral or indifferent—that all things converge
if only we can eliminate their “objective” causal contract—this is
the very evidence of seduction. To circumvent the circuits of
causality, arbitrary signs must be projected, some kind of arbitrary
codes, which is what the rules of a game are. These are the tempta¬
tions that are going to upset the causal system and the objective
way things proceed and reengage their fatal linkage. These are the
real challenges that we commonly throw down, just like the player
in the game.

Writing itself does that. Whether poetry or theory, it’s nothing
but the projection of an arbitrary code, an arbitrary system (an
invention of the rules of a game) where things come to be taken
in their fatal development. Those little catastrophes like the col¬
lapse of meaning, those effects of the turbulence of events, we may
interpret them, as does David Ruelle, 8 as part of a rational logic of
the unexpected, according to what he calls “the sensitive depen¬
dency of initial conditions” of systems. Such a system is affected

8. David Ruelle, Traverses #23.

The Object and Its Destiny / 189

from the beginning with a minimal disturbance that is amplified
existentially (especially in proximity to strange attractors) with
incalculable consequences within a relatively short time. “A sneeze
can cause a cyclone months later in another part of the world.” A
fascinating connection, by the very exaggeration of the effect, but
one which remains objective and determinist right up to its very
unpredictability.

I think, though, that something else is at work in these sudden
escalations that surprise the course of things. What happens here is
a logical mutation, and not simply a matter of exponential logic. A
little as in the dream according to Freud, where words, emptied of
their meaning, begin to function as things, and are all brought back
to the same primordial, brute material state, to link together in
their material imminence, senseless (but not random) beyond all
syntax and all principle of coherence. Where words take themselves
for things and are suddenly caught in the play of things. Similarly,
sometimes events are caught in a game beyond all psychology and
objective causality, trapped in the game and doubling their bets,
paying no attention to what history has to say in the matter. Situ¬
ations themselves can escape from their meanings and, in a
suprasensual linking, they also want to become events. The con¬
nections so created seem catastrophic, telescoped, like the
unexpected turbulence of events, but which, like the “free” cou¬
pling of words in dreams, preserve the character of an extraordinary
necessity. Little accelerated gravitations, little “cyclones” are thus
born in events themselves, near the subject, but outside of it—pure
events, where the subject himself is no longer a word but a thing,
and functions at the mercy of things.

In a dream, I have just emerged from a terrible but enigmatic
period of mourning. Someone tells me that the mourning actually

190 / Fatal Strategies

passed quite quickly. I reply that it’s always like that, and everyone
around me bursts into manic laughter. I’ve unleashed a kind of
laughing catastrophe. And through this coincidence between the
little I’ve said and its exaggerated effect, I feel mysteriously swept
aside, erased. What was it I unleashed without knowing it? Or
rather, into what prodigious relation have I entered without want¬
ing to? A connection that can only depend on exactly what I’ve said,
not on what I am, nor even on the dream situation—it must
depend precisely upon the insignificance of my words and their
very banality.

What more is there to say? Nothing is closer to this delicious,
vertiginous, insoluble sensation of being the decisive element in
some situation without willing it, than pleasing someone with a
single glance. A tiny cause, an extraordinary effect: it’s the only
proof we have of the existence of God. Incalculable connections are
the stuff of our dreams, but also of our daily bread. We like nothing
more than this crazy imbalance of cause and effect—it opens
fabulous horizons on our origins and on our potential power.
They say that seduction is a strategy. Nothing could be more
wrong. Seduction is a matter of these unexpected connections that
any strategy can at best only attempt to reproduce.

The cause produces the effect. Causes therefore always have a
meaning and an end. They never lead to catastrophe (they know
only crisis). Catastrophe is the abolition of causes. It submerges
cause beneath the effect. It hurls causal connection into the abyss,
restoring for things their pure appearance or disappearance (as in
the apparition of the purely social and its simultaneous disap¬
pearance in panic). This is not, however, a matter of chance or
indeterminacy; rather it is a kind of spontaneous connection of

The Object and Its Destiny / 191

appearances, or of the spontaneous escalation of wills, as in the
challenge. Or it can come across as a sudden commutation of
forms, as in metamorphosis.

It is never causes but rather appearances that, when they link
themselves up, lead to catastrophe. Unlike the crisis, which is only
the disorder of causes, catastrophe is the delirium of forms and
appearances. Just as delusion is the pure, nonreferential linkage of
language, just as ceremony is the pure, nonreferential linkage of
gestures, rites, and costumes, so catastrophe is the pure, nonrefer¬
ential connection of things and events. There is no chance at work
in all of this. It is rather a formal linkage of the highest necessity.
(This necessity is found in the absurd escalation of negative and
grotesque events that can sometimes happen to us: instead of accu¬
mulating in sadness and collapsing into ridicule—as would be the
case if chance alone were the reason for their juxtaposition—things
fall apart, cancelling each other out in a kind of spontaneous nat¬
ural catastrophe, which can only end in the spasm and seduction of
their formal succession and the beauty of their enlacement.)

The only real pleasure in the world is to watch things “turn”
into catastrophe, to emerge finally from determinacy and indeter¬
minacy, from chance and necessity, and enter the realm of
vertiginous connections, for better or worse, where things reach
their end without passing through their means, where events attain
their effects without passing through causes. Like wit, like seduc¬
tion—where things proceed not by the detours of sense but via the
speedways of appearance.

There is no chance, then. Chance characterized the absolutely
unlikely possibility that things—deprived of their determinations
and their causes—would be left to themselves, truly free in effect,

192 / Fatal Strategies

floating in an aleatory hyperspace, with a few vague propects of
encounters of the third kind. This is, approximately, the fate
which is reserved for us at the end of all of our liberations, in the
molecular nightmare that is being prepared for us. But on another
level, much more radical than the real, this is a complete impossi¬
bility. Chance, the concept of chance, supposes that no other
connection but causal connection is possible. Chance, therefore, is
firmly on the side of necessity: if things no longer have causes (or
if they can no longer “produce” them), then they are no longer of
any order, except insofar as they revert to the forced equation of
probabilities. They wander like dead souls in the purgatory of the
aleatory. Chance is the purgatory of causality, where souls are
waiting to be given back their bodies, where effects are waiting for
their cause. Just before the nuclear hell where, decidedly, they will
be forever annihilated.

But things are linked in other ways than through their causes.
Take fatality (which we mostly confuse with chance in its mortal
effects), for example. I remember a time when, miraculously saved
from going over a cliff in a car, some Spaniards stopped on the side
of the road to touch us religiously, repeating: “Suerte, suerte

In fatality or destiny, the linkage, far from being causal, is
rather this: the sign of the apparition of things is also the sign of
their disappearance. The sign of their birth will be the sign of their
death. Meanwhile you can try to upset the order of reason, to
change the course of things, to run along under other skies or
undergo psychoanalysis. Nothing doing—the same sign, the same
constellation, the same character trait, the same little event that was
there at birth reappears there at the moment of death. The emblem
of elevation is the same as at the fall, the emblem of appearance is
that of disappearance.

The Object and Its Destiny / 193

That’s destiny. You can always go at it with your interpreta¬
tions, but it’s useless. No code, no cipher. The efficacy of a single
sign. This doesn’t necessarily concern an entire life, nor a whole
dynasty, as in clasical tragedy. It may be only a brief sequence. But
with a fatal connection, there is neither the rational nor the acci¬
dental. Nothing is less accidental than the same sign presiding over
the beginning and the end. Compared to that, everything else is
accidental; everything else is chance—but that, that is the fatum.
The fatal is absolutely opposed to the accidental (as well as to the
rational, of course). We have already long preferred the accidental
version of the world (when the rational version fails us) to the fatal
version. Our preferred version of the apparent disorder of the
world is one of chance and accident. Now—contrary to what
people think—it is likely that the accidental is extremely rare.
Chance is improbable, and fatality quite frequent. Most of the time
we lose everything on the number that won everything for us
before, and not only at the gambling table. You could say it is
hardly remarkable that people always play the same number—but
that’s the point: it’s no accident they play the same number.

Contrary to our whole virtuous morality, things have a predes¬
tined linkage. Instead of deploying according to a genesis and an
evolution, they inscribe themselves in advance in their disappear¬
ance. It is prophecy that distinguishes them, not foresight. If you
are aware of the sign of an appearance, then the hypothesis of fatal¬
ity—which is that the course of things or the vicissitudes of the
game will ineluctably lead back to the same point, to the fatal inter¬
section of the same sign—allows us to predict the event, the event
coming with a sure sign. We may then follow the course of events
as we would the progress of a ceremony, the ceremony of the world,
which it celebrates in changeless character. Not everything is destiny,

194 / Fatal Strategies

not everything is ceremony, but there are certainly, in each existence
and in the disorder of its causes and effects, little immutable
sequences of the very highest interest.

Two events, ten years apart. No connection between them. Two
disappearances the equivalent of symbolic murder. Something—
how to say it—spiritually inexpiable. The first time I was the one
who disappeared in this way; the second time I was the one aban¬
doned, and without the shadow of a reason. This doesn’t at all
reestablish a zero-sum equilibrium, and nothing was redeemed
(what could there have been to redeem?). But the story demands
that a reversibility be subtly established between two events that are
secret from each other, between which, furthermore, I have never
made any connection (I should have; these were the only two per¬
sons I dreamt about for years). Then one day the two episodes
appeared to me under the same sign, and were suddenly resolved in
the beauty of this conjunction. This sign was a name. Both persons
bore the same first name. No one can say what infinitesimal trace
things will pick for their denouement, but we can be sure that it is
not by chance. In this case the illumination was accomplished on
the basis of the coincidence of names. Suddenly these two events
that had remained unexpiated, since they were without history—
(there had been nothing to tell, neither fable nor alibi, neither good
nor bad reasons, nothing; the disappearances were innocent and
definitive, even though we ordinarily resolve things only through
fiction or psychology)—entered into another, much more extraor¬
dinary mode of resolution. They united in a kind of witticism;
through a certain predestination they found each other, these two
phantom events, and both were released and unbound from what
made them separately unintelligible. Their duplication, their twin

The Object and Its Destiny / 195

imagination, their conjunction made them suddenly understand¬
able, without the secret of either one ever having been lifted. What
could have happened, psychologically, on both sides, in the two
cases? It was unimportant to me; whatever it was that had been
meaningless was resolved in another kind of linkage.

I saved on psychoanalysis (the futility of the unconscious).

The power of events that happen to you without your having willed
them, without your having anything to do with it. But not by
chance. They happen, and this coincidence touches you, it’s destined
for you. Even if you didn’t want it, because you didn’t want it, you’re
seduced by it. That’s the whole difference between destiny and
chance. For pure chance, even supposing that it exists, is entirely
indifferent to us; pure occurrence has nothing seductive about it for
us—it’s objective, period. It is this strategy of chance we adopt to
neutralize an event or attenuate its effect: “It happened by chance”
(not my doing). The accidental death of a friend, of someone close,
cannot fail to arouse some guilty fantasy. Or else the unbearable idea
that the other person abandoned you, dying by whim. Anything is
better than this mental cruelty of a world entirely ruled by the
omnipotence of thought. And here chance is quite helpful: it’s
enough to think (difficult as that is) that things happen without
reason, or for a maximum of objective reasons (technical, material,
statistical) that remove the responsibility from us, and which, in fact,
absolve us from whatever the event could contain of a profoundly
seductive nature, whose cause we might have wanted to be. For we
would like to be the reason for anyone’s death (as for anyone’s life or
good fortune). And there is nothing revolting about this; it does not
mean we want anyone to die. But we prefer to have wanted it than
to have it happen by accident. Desiring the death of another may be

196 / Fatal Strategies

terrible from a moral point of view, but for death to be a pure func¬
tion of chance is unbearable from a symbolic point of view, which is
an even more fundamental one. Thus, from a moral point of view,
we may want to protect ourselves by all sorts of alibis (including
chance), from the fatal interconnections of events, but from a sym¬
bolic perspective it is deeply repugnant to have a neutral world, ruled
by chance and thus innocuous and meaningless, and similarly for a
world ruled by objective causes; neither one, although easier to live,
can resist the fascinating imagination of a universe entirely ruled by
a divine or diabolical chain of ^’//^coincidences, that is, a universe
where we seduce events, where we induce them and make them hap¬
pen by the omnipotence of thought—a cruel universe where no one
is innocent, and especially not us, a universe where our subjectivity
has dissolved (and we joyously accept it) because it has been absorbed
into the automatism of events, into their objective unfolding. It has
in some way become a world. Let us not forget that if we want to lay
claim to the minimal wisdom which says that it is fundamentally
necessary to have willed this world , in one way or another to have
loved it, one way or another to have invented it, it is then also nec¬
essary that neither your friends death, nor any other incidence or
catastrophe, escape your thought and will.

We would like there to be chance, senselessness, and therefore
innocence, and for the gods to continue their game of dice with the
universe, but we prefer sovereignty, cruelty, fatal interconnection to
be all-pervasive, we prefer events to be the radical consequences of
thought. We like this, but we prefer that. Likewise we like events
to link up according to their causes, but we prefer chance and pure
coincidence to pervade the world. Above all I believe that we pre¬
fer the fatal connection. Determinism will never abolish chance.
But no chance will ever abolish fate.

The Object and Its Destiny / 197

“What happens is so far ahead of our
thoughts, our intentions, that we can never catch
up to it or ever really come to know it.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the definition of fate: the precession of the effects over their
very causes. So all things happen before having happened. Reasons
come after. Sometimes things even disappear before happening,
before having occurred. What, then, do we know of them?

The fact that things are in advance of the unfolding of their
causes, their precession in time—that is their secret. It is the secret
of their seduction, and also that which prevents the real from ever
occurring, for the real is only the coincidence in time of an event
and a causal sequence.

When things go faster than their causes, they have the time to
appear, to occur as appearances before even becoming real. It’s then
that they keep their power of seduction.

Speed itself is doubtless only this: throughout and beyond all
technology, the temptation for things and people to go faster than
their cause, to thereby catch up to their beginning and annul it. As
such, it is a vertiginous mode of disappearance (Paul Virilio). But
writing is another: going faster than the conceptual connections—
this is the secret of writing.

In comparison to this catastrophic occurrence—catastrophe is
always ahead of the normal schedule; it’s always a telescoping, a
sudden instantaneity of time, a seism that pulls together the sepa¬
rated edges of time—meaning is always too late. It is like Kafka’s
Messiah, who will come only when he is no longer needed, not on
the Day of Last Judgement, but the day after.

198 / Fatal Strategies

This is the eternal delay to which things are condemned by
meaning. Forever to invent causes in order to dispell the prestige of
their apparition, forever to invent meaning to dispel appearances,
to delay their too-rapid linkage.

This reversibility of causal order—the reversion of cause on
effect, the precession and triumph of effect over cause—is funda¬
mental. You might call it primordial, fatal and original. It is the
reversibility of destiny. It somehow represents a mortal danger, pre¬
cisely because it leaves no place for chance (chance can only be
deduced, a contrario, on an order of causality). This is why our sys¬
tem, essentially Western, has replaced it with another precession,
that of the cause to the effect, and more recently with the preces¬
sion of models, the precession of simulacra to things themselves,
whose apparition they conjure up in a different mode. Precession
against precession—we need to see the challenge that opposes the
two orders. There is no place for chance here, that is, for a neutral
and indeterminate substance. The world is Manichean; in it two
orders are absolutely opposed. Nothing is determined, but every¬
thing is antagonistic.

This is why we have to go much farther than a simple crisis of
causality. Things can be in crisis only in a “normal” order of succes¬
sion. Crisis is the management of causality: liberate the causes and
find a rational connection of effects and causes; while in this sudden
precession, in this reversibility of the event that devours its own
cause, things no longer even have the time to see themselves con¬
tested in their principle and corrected as they proceed. Pure
contingency, accidentality, the brutal upending of the real and its
representation—as Clement Rosset would say—leaves a critical tem¬
porality of meaning no chance. This is the order of apparition and
pure appearance. Everything is staked on this somersault of meaning.

Tho Object and Its Destiny / 199

This is what science catches a glimpse of when, not happy with
calling into question the determinist principle of causality (the first
revolution), it intuits—beyond even the uncertainty principle,
which still functions like hyperrationality—that chance is the float¬
ing of all laws. This is already quite extraordinary. But what science
senses now, at the physical and biological limits of its exercise, is
that there is not only this floating, this uncertainty, but a possible
reversibility of physical laws. That would be the absolute enigma ,
not some ultraformula or metaequation of the universe (which the
theory of relativity was), but the idea that any law can be reversed
(not only particles into antiparticles, matter into antimatter, but
the laws themselves). The hypothesis of this reversibility has always
been affirmed by the great metaphysical systems. It is the funda¬
mental rule of the game of appearance, of the metamorphosis of
appearances, against the irreversible order of time, of law and
meaning. But it’s fascinating to see science arrive at the same
hypotheses, contrary to its own logic and evolution.

Consequently, neither causality nor determinism—nor even
flotating causality, probability, uncertainty or relativity, which
would be the last word in this matter—but rather reversion and
reversibility.

Things would then neither be linked according to law, nor free
and indeterminate according to chance, but reversible according to
the rule. The problem this poses is, therefore: how is it that from a
reversible order there could have been established an irreversible
one—that of time, causality, history, and chance itself? But perhaps
all of that only lends our world an effect of irreversibility, and
perhaps this is in the process of changing. What if even physical
laws, the surest guarantee of the effect of irreversible causality in
the universe, are slipping so gently into the reversible?

200 / Fatal Strategies

In any case it is from this reversibility, and not from causality,
that we should expect unheard-of effects. It is from there, and not
from chance and its ridiculous statistical objectivity, we must
expect a surprise—the art of escaping both chance and necessity,
the art of a certain turning, fatal and enigmatic, that rules over the
order of the apparition and the disappearance of things.

The Illusionist and the Rose of Paracelsus

The illusionist, master of his art, dreams of accomplishing the great
transmutation: to make a woman disappear before your very eyes,
right on stage. There’s nothing easier than getting rid of the rabbit,
the scarf, the hat—nothing to it; but making a woman disappear is
something he’s never managed to do, and he dreams of it. Now, one
night, during the performance, he brings the house down: the lady
has vanished. He did it, but how? The whole problem is finding
out by what secret paths, by what unexpected detour he succeeded
(maybe it was enough just to think about it, to imagine her having
disappeared—which isn’t so easy). But perhaps it was not some
power that made her disappear, but chance, which he had nothing
to do with, of which he was only a conductor.

The other story: that of Paracelsus. A student comes to visit; he
wants Paracelsus to become his teacher and teach him his powers.
But he wants immediate proof of them. Paracelsus is reluctant. The
student insists, throwing the rose he is holding into the fireplace
and defying Paracelsus to resurrect it. Paracelsus declines, saying he
can’t. The student, disappointed and angry, leaves. Then Paracelsus
leans over the fireplace, pronounces a single word, and the rose is
fully revived.

The Object and Its Destiny / 201

Borges’s tale is impenetrable in that, outside of a rather con¬
ventional story of teacher and student, it is almost impossible in
the end to know if Paracelsus is really able to revive the rose with a
word, or if he simply tries to do it, and by miracle or chance, it
“works,” the most surprised of all being Paracelsus himself. He
actually wasn’t lying when he told the disciple he didn’t have the
power to do it; the power came to him unexpectedly; perhaps it
was not a power at all, but chance, accident, an occurrence
remaining forever a mystery.

By what effect, which would be neither chance (too improba¬
ble) nor a power (too easy), would the woman disappear and the
rose reappear? We have to think. (Why search for plausibility in
imaginary stories? But these, and never the true stories, are precisely
the ones that require a secret solution; they are like witticisms that
demand a witty kind of analysis.) And this hypothesis, as we are
well aware, has a lot that is unreal about it, as much unreality as the
evidence that is missing and will always be missing—we have to
think that everything turns on a reversible imminence of things
that it is enough simply to grasp. When it comes down to it, there
is really no good reason why the lady shouldn’t vanish, and that is
the magician’s secret: everything real is ready, indeed, immediately
inclined to disappear—simply waiting for it, you could say. It is
enough to dispel the will to reality, the will to persist and to exist
that makes things last beyond their apparition. Or perhaps we need
to grasp the rule according to which, as soon as something appears,
it can only disappear. In this manner things ask only to seduce; it’s
enough to dispel their will to meaning. Both go together, in fact.
To make the lady vanish you have to seduce her (detour her from
her real, all too-real existence). To revive the rose, it is enough to
seduce it (detour it from its ashen inexistence). For to seduce things

202 / Fatal Strategies

is to put them back into their cycle of appearance and disappear¬
ance, of incessant metamorphoses, and to put yourself back in the
cycle, where there is neither chance nor power, but where appear¬
ance and disappearance are linked according to the ineluctable rule
(this is destiny). According to a linear and willed order, the lady can
never vanish, the rose can never reappear. They can only do this in
a reversible order, where all the art lies in positioning oneself.

The Ceremony of the World

In the order of highly conventional and perfectly arranged connec¬
tions, in the order of connections devoid of the greatest necessity,
ceremony is the equivalent of fatality.

An ecstatic connection like that of the game: ceremony has no
meaning, it has only esoteric rule. It has no end, since it is initiatory.

In it we find the definitively factitious and conventional order
of the world exalted, the occult objectivity that shines behind the
subjectivity of appearances.

They say that savage thinking ( la pensee sauvage) subjectivizes
everything, without taking into account the objectivity of the world.
But it is we who, behind our alibi of objective reason, subjectivize,
psychologize, and impose everywhere an occult subjectivity.

The ceremony puts an end to this occultism of subjectivity.

Let him (the Brahmin) never look at the sun rising or setting, or
during an eclipse, or when it is reflected in water, or in the mid¬
dle of its course.

Let him never step over a rope to which a cow is attached,
nor run while it is raining, nor look at his image in water; such

The Object and Its Destiny / 203

is the established rule. Let him, when he passes, always keep to the
right of a hillock, a cow, an idol, a Brahmin, a bowl of clarified
butter or honey, a place where four roads meet, and the great
well-known frees.

However strong his desire let him not approach his wife once
her period has started, nor lie in the same bed with her. Let him
not eat out of the same plate as his wife, nor look at her while she
eats, sneezes, yawns—nor when she is sitting nonchalantly. Nor
when she puts makeup on her eyes, or perfumes herself, nor when
her breast is exposed, nor when she is giving birth.

Let him never leave his urine or his excrement on the road,
nor on the ashes of a fire, nor on pasture land, nor on plowed
land, nor in water, nor on a funeral pyre, nor on a mountain,
nor in the ruins of a temple, nor on the nest of white ants.

Nor in holes inhabited by living creatures, nor while walk¬
ing, nor standing, nor on a riverbank, nor on a mountaintop.
Likewise, he should never evacuate his urine or his excrement-
while looking at objects shaking in the wind, nor looking at a fire,
nor a Brahman, nor water, nor cows.

During the day let him evacuate facing north; at night,
facing south; at dawn and at twilight, in the same way as during
the day.

— The Laws of Manu, Book IV

Every detail of existence, in the code of Manu, is minutely ritual¬
ized: a theatre of cruelty, every moment marked with a necessary
sign, a discrimination, a secret distinction (not at all a sociological
distinction; this would be characteristic of a weaker, more banal
order, a disorder of the rule and the ceremonial which yields to any

204 / Fatal Strategies

subjective evaluations—but this order, the sociological one, is fun¬
damentally not very interesting) in the slightest action, the most
insignificant word, the minutest bodily secretion, the least remark¬
able of natural events. Everything is initiatory, in the sense that
nothing happens except by way of the necessary, ineluctable sign of
its apparition—nothing changes except by the necessary,
ineluctable signs of its metamorphoses.

That is the ceremony of the world, its perfect ordering, which
is the opposite of subjective desire and objective chance. Desire
and chance are stricken from the ceremony. It is no longer even a
metaphor. There is no rhetoric, no allegory, no metaphysics in the
text of the Laws ofManu. No mystery either: but the pure unfold¬
ing, the pure cipher of the ceremonial of days and nights with
their obligations. Language is immanent, as is rite: it sets forth
rules, and does not get involved with dialectics or psychology. It
has no recourse either to justificatory or allusive myths. It tells us
what to do, period. Not a system of values or interpretation: a
system of rules.

Now this is where signs take on their greatest intensity: when
they require only pure observance. When, like the rules of a game,
they push the abitrary, the discriminatory, to the limit. Not differ¬
ence, which is always meaningful, but discrimination , which is the
truly rigorous form of labeling, and the equivalent to predestina¬
tion in time—that which is always already there before it has
happened (thus perfectly miraculous), which takes on the power of
a sign before being meaningful (thus perfectly arbitrary), which is
imposed as goal before being justified (thus perfectly unjust). All of
this might seem to us, in the moral, sentimental and democratic
order in which we live, perfectly immoral and unjustifiable; in fact,
we have long directed all our fulminations at predestination and

The Object and Its Destiny / 205

discrimination, while we cultivate lovingly, on the contrary,
finality and difference—however, it is in predestination and dis¬
crimination that things and signs attain the highest level of
intensity, fascination and jouissance.

The process that regulates events in the world on the basis of the
occurrence of a pure sign, or in the event of a ceremonial sign, even
if it were a catastrophic process, will always be more grandiose and
more fascinating than that of causal development. The former,
which steals our liberty and involves us in a cycle of predestination
(even if it were the most banal form of “chance”) is more likely to
seduce us than a process that involves a liberty and responsibility
which are, in any case, equally groundless: instead of consigning
ourselves to the comic sight of a liberty grappling with the problem
of its own foundation, let us turn rather to the tragedy of the purely
arbitrary. Each of us secretly prefers an arbitrary and cruel order, one
that leaves us no choice, to the horrors of a liberal one where we
don’t even know what we want, where we are forced to recognize
that we don’t know what we want; for in the former case we are con¬
signed to maximal determination, and in the second to indifference.
Everyone secretly prefers an order so rigorous, an unfolding of
events so arbitrary (or so illogical, as with fate or ceremony) that the
slightest disturbance can make the whole thing collapse—everyone
prefers this to the dialectical workings of reason, where a finalizing
logic dominates all accidents of language. Without a doubt, we have
a deep desire to subvert destiny, to disturb the ceremony, as well as
to violate any and all orders: but this violence itself is then predes¬
tined. It takes on greater relief from the ceremonial order. It is not
an informal violence; it creates a dramaturgic peripety. I’m thinking
of that very beautiful scene in Gate of Hell where, during the long

206 / Fatal Strategies

sequence of the tea ceremony that goes on in silence, one of the
knights suddenly gets up and turns over a cup: all the secret conflicts
come to the surface in this single sign, whose violence is not really
external to the rule—it seems to be the very tension connected with
the ceremony that produces the sudden infraction as its necessary
effect. Ceremonial violence appears not as a transgression, but as an
exacerbation of the rule, where the whole world is suspended in the
interruption of the game. The same effect is obtained in Chinese
opera when all the moving warriors suddenly become still, at the
high point of their dual attack, in a mute paroxysm where immo¬
bility itself does violence to movement.

All ceremonies are in this manner violent in their unfolding, but
this violence is that of the reversibility of the rule, not that of the
transgression of the law. The sign drags its opposite along with it
through the very power of signs as such. In itself, the connection of
signs in ceremony, the fact that they can succeed and engender one
another solely according to the rule of the ritual, already constitutes
a violence done to the real. And the fact that every ceremony is
linked according to a cycle is a violence done to time. And the fact
that it is organized solely on the basis of signs—thousands of pure
signs whose suprasensual relation it recovers—is a violence against
meaning and the logic of meaning. The entire seduction of the
ceremony lies in this idolatrous, demiurgic, and barbarous violence
that is opposed to the culture of meaning.

If ceremony is synonymous with slowness, it is because it is of
the order of predestination and of regulated unfolding. Hurrying,
as with sacrifice, would be sacrilege. The rule must be given a
chance to function and gestures must have the time to be completed.
Time must have the time to disappear.

The Object and Its Destiny / 207

The ceremony contains the presentiment of its development
and its end. It has no spectators. Wherever there is spectacle, cere¬
mony ceases, for it is also violence against representation. The space
where it moves is not a stage, a scene, a space of scenic illusion: it
is a locus of immanence and of the unfolding of the rule. Let’s con¬
sider again the way the game works (cards, chess, chance): there is
nothing less theatrical than a passion for gambling—all intensity is
withdrawn into the interior, towards the internal operation of the
rule, toward the difference of stage and spectacle that is open to
view. The slightest dramatic intrusion of the gaze plunges ceremony
into aesthetics, which thereby becomes the source of a pleasure; but
ceremony is not of the order of pleasure, it is of the order of power,
which it possesses by virtue of the immanence, in each of its signs
and actors, of its development, and not by virtue of some kind of
transcendence of aesthetic judgement.

Ceremony has the racial and ritual beauty of Japanese faces, in
contrast to the reflexive and idealized aesthetics of our Western
faces. Our Western beauty is related either to characteristics of
nature and expression (character beauty) or to characteristics of
fashion (the dominance of successive ideals and models, idealization
of such a trait at such a time, etc.). Naturalized and idealized, it pre¬
supposes a distinction between beautiful and ugly (more recently,
even, a rather ferocious blackmail by beauty). Oriental traits, on the
contrary—without considering that they emphasize the face less
and imply more of a gestural ceremony of the whole body—are
racial, therefore arbitrary and conventional, in opposition to our
naturalist and expressionist aesthetic; but they suddenly acquire a
much more extraordinary beauty, that of a ritual morphology that is
the same for all. No distinction: the same beauty plays on the faces
of men and women, and somehow no one is ugly, because they all

208 / Fatal Strategies

receive their outline from the same destiny. Compared to this,
Western beauty, with its individuation according to hybrid models,
seems extremely vulgar. The play of morphological signifiers of race
comes out far ahead of the signified aesthetic values of our culture.

Ceremonial beauty is not that of the subject, just as the inten¬
sity of the game is not that of affect or desire. The ceremonial game
is broken up as well by moral law or by desire.

Today we place the moral law above signs. The play of conven¬
tional forms is deemed hypocritical and immoral: we oppose it
with “the politeness of the heart” or even the radical impoliteness
of desire. We believe in exchange and in the sincerity of exchange,
and in a natural truth of feelings and affects. We believe in a hid¬
den truth of rapports of force whose expressive superstructure
would be signs, always suspected of subverting reality and mystify¬
ing consciousness. We believe in a hidden sexual truth of the body,
this body being nothing more than a surface for decipherment. We
believe in the primacy of an informal energy, or of a depth of
meaning (the law inscribed deep in peoples hearts) whose purpose
is to make its way through the surface confusion of signs. And we’re
ready to transgress established codes to make the Law and Truth
shine forth in their splendor.

It’s true that etiquette and politeness (and ceremony in general)
are no longer what they once were. But it’s because we want to give
etiquette meaning that we give it affectation. It’s because we want
to substitute the necessity of the Law for the arbitrariness of the
rule that the signs of etiquette become arbitrary conventions. We
could—we might as well—saddle the rules of chess with moral
reprobation. Now etiquette and politeness—what there was of
them in a ceremonial order that is no longer our own—do not even

The Object and Its Destiny / 209

have as a purpose, any more than rituals do, to temper the initial
violence of rapports, to dispel threats and aggressiveness (holding
out one’s hand to show that one is not armed, etc.). As if there were
some finality in the civility of mores: this is our hypocrisy, imputing
everywhere and always a moralizing function for exchanges. But
the law inscribed in heaven is not at all one of exchange. It’s rather the
pact of alliance and seductive connections.

A seductive connection is one that avoids the promiscuity of cause
and effect. Signs don’t draw up a contract of exchange with each
other, but a pact of alliance. Now, here does there reign a law of
meaning, but only the interconnection of appearances. The heavens
too, with their turning signs, are really arcs of alliance where the
constellations are linked and arrayed as for a ceremonial destiny.
Being born under a sign is not at all to interpret it or to make it
signify according to its meaning: it is affiliating with it, forming an
alliance with it, recognizing its power of predestination. It’s not a
matter of believing or disbelieving, any more than with the signs of
politeness and etiquette: the mistake is always in giving meaning to
what has none. Destiny—an ineluctable and recurrent unfolding of
signs and appearances—has become for us a strange and unaccept¬
able form. We no longer want a destiny. We want a history. But
ceremony was the image of destiny.

There is no way to rehabilitate etiquette as a social function.
When it is no more than that, it is in effect ridiculous and absurd,
as with the resurrection of yoga as psychodietetic discipline or the
recycling of martial arts in Bejart’s choreography. The rights of the
individual, his or her drives, free expression, and the liberation of
speech have put an end to this futile ceremonial and to the
hypocrisy of signs. Bravo!

210/ Fatal Strategies

However, this unleashing of truth, this triumph of sincerity in
all its forms, also consecrates the end of illusion, of the power of
illusion. Illusion in the literal sense of an initiation to the rule, to
a superior agreement and convention in which something other
than the real is at stake. The game is based on this possibility for
every system to overflow its own reality principle and to be refract¬
ed in another logic. This is the secret of illusion, and what is at
stake is always to rescue this vital dimension. Just like the eigh¬
teenth-century magician who had invented an automaton that
could imitate human actions so perfectly that he was obliged on
stage to “automatize” himself, to imitate mechanical imperfection
precisely in order to save the game, to preserve the infinitessimal
difference that made the form of illusion possible: if the two of
them had been equally perfect, all seduction would have vanished.

What we call art, theatre, language have worked for centuries to save
illusion in this sense, that is, to maintain the tiny distance that makes
the real play with its own reality, that plays with the disappearance of
the real while exalting its appearance, and to rescue this ironic rule of
the game. In this sense they have kept something of ceremony and
ritual in the violence they do to the real. It is in art (and certainly not
in what we today call ceremony: monuments to the dead, giving out
prizes, Olympic Games, etc.) that something of this ceremonial and
initiatory power has been preserved, even though considerably weak¬
ened. It is there that a strategy of appearances has been conserved,
that is, a mastery of apparitions and disappearances, and, in particu¬
lar, the sacrificial mastery of the eclipse of the real.

Certainly our current interpretation of the game goes in the
opposite direction. Our ideal vision of the game is that of the child;
paideia, free spontaneity and wild creativity, the expression of a

The Object and Its Destiny / 211

pure nature, before the time of Law and repression. 1 he animal
game as opposed to the ceremonial game. But we know that the bird
does not sing for its own pleasure, nor does the child play this way.
Even in the most “frenzied” games, the charm of recurrence, of ritual,
of meticulous unfolding, the invention of rules and complicity in
observance, are what makes for the intensity and simplicity of
child’s play. The scansion of the fort-da, for example, could easily
mean the conjuration of the mothers absence, but it’s also first of all
a kind of ceremony, a control and mastery of appearance and disap¬
pearance. The supposition of fantasy puts an end to the originality
of this form, since it gives it a meaning—it likewise ends the seduc¬
tion proper to play, which is precisely only a matter of appearances.

The secret is made up of the annihilation of causes and the burial
of ends in the organized order of appearances alone: the Rule of
Appearances and Disappearances.

Now, ceremonies were established in order to regulate appear¬
ance and disappearance. What has always fascinated people is the
double miracle of the apparition of things and of their disappear¬
ance. What people have always wanted to conserve is control over
them and over their rule: that of birth and death, but also of the
eclipse of the stars, the rapture of passion, and the revolving of the
natural cycle. It is only our modern culture that has capitulated to
this form of obligation and entrusted everything to that informed
and formless form of freedom called chance, or to that induc¬
tive/deductive form of connection called necessity.

Today, after having staked everything on the mode of produc¬
tion and having exhausted its illusion, we are faced with a mode of
appearance and disappearance while no longer possessing any cer¬
emonial mastery. Our time refuses the charm of appearance and

212/ Fatal Strategies

disappearance, just as it rejects the artifice and sacrifice which alone
can guarantee their sovereignty. The entire order of production was
established to make an order of the apparition of things impossi¬
ble, to prevent them from coming into existence too suddenly, even
before they have the right to exist or to have a meaning.

Already here, even before arriving—this, however, is how
things really happen to us: under the visage (or mask) of pure
appearance. Banality itself can take on this face of pure appearance,
and it can then become a destiny once more, that is, a mode of
simultaneous appearance and disappearance.

Today, in order to justify the apparition of things, we are
reduced to invoking a productive energy, an energy of drives—for
death itself, we are reduced to invoking the death drive. But the
search for control over the mode of disappearance is the opposite
of the death drive, and has, in fact, nothing to do with it.

Our fundamental destiny is not to exist and survive, as we think: it
is to appear and disappear. That alone seduces and fascinates us. That
alone is scene and ceremony. We mustn’t believe that it is up to
chance to make things appear and disappear, our own task being to
make them last or to give them meaning. Nothing is less likely than
chance to bring about the scene where things have the luxury of dis¬
appearing: chance can only lead to statistical extermination. Nothing
is less capable than chance of making something appear: for some¬
thing really to appear, surging up to the reign of appearances, there
must be seduction. For something to really disappear, to resolve into
its appearance, there must be a ceremony of metamorphosis.

The Peking Opera: all Chinese theatre, whether it is in battles, or
in love, or in the game of signs and flags, is a staging of the dual

The Object and Its Destiny / 213

felinity of bodies, actions, voices and movements, a perpetual
enlacement at the minimal distance of doubling. Bodies are mobile
and acrobatic mirrors of each other. Clothes, jewelry, fans brush
against each other in a spiral dance; the weapons do not touch, but
brush against each other violently, describing an empty space into
which one cannot cross (that of the darkness of the dueling
episode, of battle or seduction in the episodes of war and love, of
water in the story of the boatman and the girl, where the entire
space of the river is made physically manifest in the twin undula¬
tion of their two bodies—as far from each other as the length of the
invisible boat, voices and bodies alternating in a duel where, in
nothing more than the ceremonial space of their arrangement, the
whole danger of the crossing is evoked). Nor is there anything more
beautiful than this nocturnal duel where bodies search for but
cannot find each other, describing with precision and violence the
empty space of shadow, rendering palpable the darkness that sepa¬
rates them and the complicity, made of this reversibility of each of
their movements, that unites them.

Everything is arranged: felinity, avoidance, advance, retreat, con¬
frontation, the whirling frenzy of the bodies, their sudden
immobility; nothing is left to a letting-go, to improvisation: every¬
thing is linked and connected, but never with a connection of
meaning—always a connection of appearances. Perfection is
attained in the theater when it finds this marvellous mobility, this
aerial readiness, this felinity of appearances where they link up so
effortlessly. Felinity, in the animal also, in the animal above all, is
the sovereign interconnection of body and movement. Here, in this
theater, felinity delivers signs from the weight of meaning—they
can then play in a limitless mobility, and even culminate in

214 / Fatal Strategies

absolute immobility where space becomes frozen in adversity, in
the enlacement at the summit of two dual forces.

Combats are never confrontations, rapports of force, but
strategems, that is to say the agonistic illustration of a ruse, of a
non-frontal violence, of a parallel and mobile strategy. Every body
duplicates the movement of the other, draws itself as a lure where the
other, petrified, finds only the void. Each one triumphs by appear¬
ance, by sending back to the other the appearance of his strength.
But each one knows that triumph is not definitive, for no one will
ever occupy the blind spot around which the battle is arrayed.
Wanting to occupy it, wanting to take the empty space of strategem
(like wanting to annex the empty heart of truth), is madness and an
absolute misunderstanding of the world as play and ceremony.

This is, however, what our Western theatre does when it substi¬
tutes the speculative mirror of psychology for the dual reversibility of
bodies and gestures. Bodies and signs collide because they have lost
their ceremonial aura (Benjamin). The difference can be felt even in
the movements of crowds and masses: while in the Western space of
the subway, the city, the market, people bump against each other,
fighting for space, or at best avoid each other’s trajectories, in an
aggressive promiscuity, the crowds in the Orient, or in an Arab cas-
bah, know how to move differently, glide with presentiment (or
consideration), care, even in a tight space, the interstitial spaces the
meat-cutter of the Chuang-Tzu was talking about, through which his
blade passes effortlessly. And this is not a question of boundaries
between bodies that we make an effort to demarcate by “free” spaces
or individual territories; it is the consequence of a ceremonial space,
of a sacred space of arrangement that also controls the way bodies
appear to each other. Ceremony is a tactile universe, made to main¬
tain bodies at the right distance, which is that of regulated gestures

The Object and Its Destiny / 215

and appearance, and to make this distance felt. Two bodies that
bump and collide are obscene and impure. Two things that enter into
direct contact, whatever they are, be it two words or two signs, two
things that couple with no formal process involved, are impure.
Their promiscuity is like that of cadavers on the ground, with only
excrement between them. There must be discrimination; otherwise
the world becomes impoverished, wretched and violent in a perfectly
futile way: in confusion.

Dress serves this purpose—not fashion in its differential sys¬
tem, but dress in its power of discrimination from “nature.” Fashion
is a form of liberation of bodies and clothes in a play of combina¬
tions which becomes ever more random. Dress involves, on the
other hand, an immovable ceremonial constraint. It is part of the
tactile, immanent, initiatory universe of the ceremony. (With ani¬
mals, plumage, for example, is even a part of the genetic patrimony,
the reason why animals have been man’s model for the ceremonial
order and not at all of the “natural” order.)

Fashion relates to the transcendent, modern, mobile, exoteric
universe of looking and representation. It arises from a caprice of the
desire for forms, from an aesthetic and political desire for distinc¬
tion—the signs of fashion are also distinctive, and operate according
to a code which is the universal code of fashion, thus entering into
the concert of modern subjectivity, opposing the archaic, timeless,
discriminatory rigor of ornament. (Fashion can certainly assume the
form of a collective incantation, but it is never the sacrificial act of a
group, as is ceremony. Even infinitely varied, it results fundamen¬
tally from a process of confusion and promiscuity of all possible
forms.) These same forms that were ceremonial have fallen into the
system of fashion; we mustn’t, however, confuse them.

216/ Fatal Strategies

No confusion, no promiscuity. Theory is just like ceremony. The
role of the latter—or of all rituals, whatever kind they may be—is
certainly not to conjure away some “original violence”—liturgy is
not a catharsis! That is the misunderstanding, as old as functional¬
ism, of all the idealists of original violence, of all the bleeding
hearts of anthropology. Nor is it the purpose of theory to render
concepts dialectical and universal: on the contrary, it is both cere¬
mony and theory that are violent; both are produced to prevent
things and concepts from touching indiscriminately, to create dis¬
crimination, and remake emptiness, to redistinguish what has been
confused. Struggling against the viviparous obscenity of the confu¬
sion of ideas, struggling against the promiscuity of concepts—that
is theory (when it is radical), and ceremony too has never done
anything else, when it separates the initiated from the uninitiated
(for ceremony is always initiatory), when it distinguishes between
what connects according to the rule and what doesn’t (for ceremony
is always organizing), between what is exalted and destroyed
according to its very appearance and that which is produced only
as meaning. Ceremony is always sacrificial.

When signs no longer represent a destiny, but a history, then
they are no longer ceremonial. When behind them lurk sociology,
semiology, psychoanalysis, they are no longer rituals. They have lost
that power of metamorphosis immanent to the act of ceremony.
They are closer to the truth, but they have lost the power of illu¬
sion. They are closer to the real, to our scene of the real, but they
have lost their theatre of cruelty.

The Object and Its Destiny / 217

neither the double nor the repressed of the subject, neither its fan¬
tasy nor its hallucination, neither its mirror nor its reflection—it
has its own strategy and holds the key to the rules of a game,
impenetrable to the subject, not because they are deeply mysteri¬
ous, but because they are infinitely ironic.

It is objective irony that lies in wait for us, the irony of the
fulfillment of the object without regard for the subject or its
alienation. In the phase of alienation, it is subjective irony that
triumphs; it is the subject that constitutes an insoluble challenge to
the blind world that surrounds him. Subjective irony, ironic sub¬
jectivity, is the essence of a world of interdiction, Law and desire.
The power of the subject lies in its promise of fulfillment, whereas
the sphere of the object is the order of what has been fulfilled, and
from which, for this very reason, it is impossible to escape.

We confuse the fatal with the return of the repressed (what is
inescapable is desire), but the order of fatality is antithetical to that
of repression. What is inescapable is not desire, but the ironic pres¬
ence of the object, its indifference and indifferent connections, its
challenge, its seduction, and its disobediance to the symbolic order
(and therefore also of the subjects unconscious, if he had one).
What is inescapable, in a word, is the principle of Evil.

The subject obeys our metaphysics, which has always tried to
distill Good and Evil. The object, however, is translucent to evil.
This is why it shows—mischievously, diabolically—its voluntary
servitude; bends willingly, like nature, to any law we impose upon
it; and disobeys all legislation. And when I speak of the object and
its profound duplicity, I speak of all of us and our political and
social order. I he whole problem of voluntary servitude should be
reexamined in this light, not to resolve it but to sound out the

220 / Fatal Strategies

enigma: obedience, in effect, is a banal strategy, which doesn’t need
to be explained, for it secretly contains—all obedience secretly
contains—a fatal disobedience to the symbolic order.

This is how a principle of Evil exists, not as a mystical process
and transcendence, but as a hide-out for the symbolic order—as
the theft, the rape, the receiving of stolen goods and the ironic
embezzlement of the symbolic order. This is how the object is
transparent to the principle of Evil. Unlike the subject, it is a poor
conductor of the symbolic order, but a good conductor of the
fatal—that is to say of a pure objectivity, sovereign and incorrigi¬
ble, immanent and enigmatic.

Furthermore, it is not Evil that is interesting, it’s the spiral of
worsening. For the subject clearly reflects, to its dismay, the Evil
principle in its mirror; but the object wants to be worse, and
demands the worst. It is proof of a more radical negativity, namely,
that if everything finally disobeys the symbolic order, it’s because
everything was subverted from the very beginning.

Even before being produced, the world was seduced. A strange
precession which today still weighs on all of reality. The world has
been refuted at its source—so it is impossible for it ever to be ver¬
ified. Negativity, whether historical or subjective, is nothing: the
truly diabolical, even in thought, is original subversion.

Opposed to the utopia of The Last Judgement, complimen¬
tary to that of the original baptism, we find the vertigo of
simulation, the Luciferian rapture of the eccentricity of the
beginning and the end.

This is why the gods can only live and hide in the inhuman, in
objects and animals, in the sphere of silence and objective brutish¬
ness, and not in the sphere of man, which is that of language and
subjective brutishness. The God-Man is an absurdity. A god who

For a Principle of Evil / 221

rejects the ironic mask of the inhuman, who emerges from the
bestial metaphor, from the objective metamorphosis where he
incarnated in silence the principle of Evil, in order to don a soul
and a face, assumes at the same time the hypocritical psychology of
the human.

We need to be respectful of the inhuman. This is the way of
certain cultures, which we call fatalist, as a way of condeming them
without trial, because they found their commandments on the side
of the inhuman, on the side of the stars, or of an animal god, of
constellations or faceless divinities. A grand choice, that of a face¬
less divinity. Nothing is less like our own modern and technical
iconolatry.

Metaphysics only allows good rays to filter in, and wants to
make the world into the mirror of the subject (who has already
passed through a mirror phase). Metaphysics wants a world of
forms distinct from their doubles, their shadows, their images: this
is the principle of Good. But the object is always the fetish, the
false, the feiticbo, the factitious, the lure, everything that incarnates
the abominable confusion of the thing with its magical and artifi¬
cial double; and that no religion of transparency and the mirror
will ever be able to resolve: that is the principle of Evil.

When I speak of the object and its fatal strategies, I’m speaking
also of people and their inhuman strategies. For example, a human
being can find in a vacation a greater boredom than in everyday
life—a redoubled boredom, because it is made up of all the ele¬
ments of happiness and distraction. The important point is the
predestination of vacations to boredom, the bitter and triumphal
foreboding that there’s no escaping this. How could we suppose
that people were going to disavow their daily life and look for an
alternative to it? On the contrary, they’ll make a destiny out of it:

222 / Fatal Strategies

intensify it while seeming to do the opposite, plunge into it to the
point of ecstasy, seal the monotony of it with an even greater
monotony. This hyperbanality is the equivalent of fatality.

If one doesn’t understand this, then one understands nothing
of this collective brutishness, which is a grand act of self-surpass¬
ing. I’m not joking: people are not looking for amusement; instead
they want to find a fatal distraction. Boredom is not the problem—
the essential point is the increase of boredom; increase is salvation
and ecstasy. It could mean the ecstatic deepening of anything, even
the increase of oppression and abjection that works like the liber¬
ating ecstasy of abjection—just as the absolute commodity works
like the liberating form of the commodity. This is the only solution
to the problem of “voluntary servitude.” Furthermore there is no
liberation but this one: in the deepening of negative conditions. All
forms that tend to project a dazzling and miraculous liberty are
only revolutionary homilies. Liberating logic is basically under¬
stood only by a few; essentially it is fatal logic that wins out.

Another form of fundamental cynicism: this will to spectacle
and illusion, opposed to all will for knowledge and power: tena¬
cious, deep in man’s heart, it haunts nonetheless the process of
events. There is, as it were, a drive for pure event, objective infor¬
mation, the most secret facts and thoughts, to be commuted into
spectacle, to attain ecstasy in a scene instead of being produced as
something really happening. To occur is necessary, to be in ecstasy
is absolutely vital.

Things can only happen in this excessive manner, that is to say,
not in the hold of representation, but in the magic of their effect—
there only they appear great and do themselves the luxury of
existing. We think of nature as indifferent, and it certainly is to the
passions and enterprises of man; but it isn’t perhaps indifferent to

For a Principle of Evil / 223

the fact of making a spectacle of itself in natural disasters. This is
something of a parable, but its here only to signify this passion of
passions, simulating passion, seductive passion, subversive passion,
that means that things are meaningless unless transfigured by this
illusion, this derision, this production which is not at all a repre¬
sentation, but their prodigious and eccentric form, the will to
disdain their causes and to lose ourselves in their effects, and par¬
ticularly in the effects of their disappearance. Prodigious form that
moralists have always condemned, for here is where things cynical¬
ly subvert themselves from their beginnings and their ends, in a
distant echo of original sin.

Furthermore, it is this eccentricity that protects us from the real
and its disastrous consequences. That things exhaust themselves in
their spectacle—in a magic and artificial fetishism—is the distor¬
tion that serious minds will always oppose, in their utopian
expurgation of the world in order to deliver it exact, intact, and
authentic for the day of Last Judgement. But this spectacle that the
moralists disapprove of is possibly the lesser evil. For God knows
where unleashed meaning would lead to when it refuses to produce
itself as appearance.

Even Revolution can happen only if its spectacle is possible:
what the “beautiful souls” deplore is that the media are putting
an end to the real event. But if we consider the problem of
nuclear annihilation, we may realize the possibility that it is its
distillation in simulated everyday panic, in the haunting and
spectacular thrills that the media treat our fears to, that protects
us from the nuclear clash, and not the balance of terror (there is
no strategic guarantee in deterrence, nor, furthermore, any sur¬
vival instinct of the species). What protects us is that, for nuclear

224 / Fatal Strategies

holocaust, the event threatens dangerously to deny us all hope of
spectacle. That is why it wont happen. Humanity can accept its
own physical disappearance, but it cannot accept to sacrifice its
spectacle (unless it succeeds in finding a spectator in another
world). The drive to spectacle is more powerful than the survival
instinct, we can count on that . 9

If the morality of things lies in their sacrosanct use-value, then
long live the immorality of the atom and of nuclear arms, which
cause even them to be submitted to the ultimate and cynical event
of the spectacle. Long live the secret rule of the game that causes
everything to disobey the symbolic law! What will save us is neither
the rational principle nor use-value. Rather, it’s the immoral prin¬
ciple of the spectacle, the ironic principle of Evil.

Absorption in this secondary effect is a kind of passion and a
kind of fatal will. Likewise, no life can be conceived of outside the
framework of a second chance. The design of a life cannot be given
except by the vibrant certainty of a necessary return, sooner or
later—a little like the resurrection of the body, but without the Last
Judgement—the reappearance of certain moments or faces that
have once been. These will come back, for they can only disappear
on the horizon of your life, whose trajectory, subverted precisely by
events, takes the unconscious curve necessary to give them the
chance of a second life, or of a definitive return. Then only will they
really have taken place. Then only they’ll have been lost or won.

9. Of course, this is not the spectacle that the Situationists denounced as the acme
of alienation and the ultimate limit of capitalism. Neither would it be instead the
opposite, since here it is a matter of the victorious strategy of the object, its own
mode of subversion, and not a way in which it is subverted. We would be much
closer, in fact, with the charm of the commodity in Baudelaire.

For a Principle of Evil / 225

From a certain moment on, these second comings comprise
the very design of existence, where consequently nothing happens
by chance; it’s the first coming—which is not meaningful in itself
and loses itself in the banal obscurity of living—that happens by
chance. Only by redoubling can it make of itself a true event,
attaining the character of a fatal happening. It’s like an astrologi¬
cal sign that is meaningful only when accompanied by its
ascendant: the sign itself is nothing; accompanied, it becomes
ineluctable.

Once certain events of a life have thus had their second chance,
once the cycle has brought them back once and once only, that life
is completed. When a life knows no second coming of this kind, it
ends before having begun.

The fatal is there somewhere, in that direction. In this sense,
the old heresies were right. Everyone has the right to a second
birth: the true one. Everyone is predestined: not by astral decree,
but by internal immanence in our own life, to the necessary return
of such events. This is why, chance having been abolished, the Last
Judgement is useless.

This is why the theory of predestination is infinitely superior to
that of freedom of the soul. Predestination eliminates from life all
that is only destined—all that, having happened only once, is only
accidental, while what happens a second time becomes fatal; but it
also gives to life the intensity of these secondary events, which
have, as it were, the depth of a previous existence.

There is neither form nor meaning to a first encounter, still
stained with misunderstanding and banality. Fatality only comes
afterwards, by the current effect of this previous life. And there is a
sort of will and energy in this occurrence, which no one knows
anything about, and which isn’t the resurgence of a hidden order.

226 / Fatal Strategies

Not at all. It’s in the full light of day that certain things come to
their assigned existence.

If the stars rose and set in just any order, heaven itself would be
meaningless. It’s the recurrence of their trajectory that makes for
the heavenly event. And it’s the recurrence of certain fatal peripeties
that makes for the event of a life.

At the end of all that, if the object is ingenious, if the object is fatal,
what can we do about it?

After the art of survival, the ironic art of disappearance? The
subject has always dreamed of this, a dream inverse to its dream of
totalization, and the one has never been able to erase the other.
Quite the contrary. Its failure today awakens passions that are
much more subtle.

At the heart of banal strategies is the fiery desire of fatal strategies.

Nothing can guarantee us a fatality, even less a strategy. What
is more, the conjunction of these two terms is paradoxical: how
could there be fatality if there is strategy? That’s just the point: the
enigma is that fatality is at the heart of every strategy. It’s what
peeks through the heart of more banal strategies. It’s the object,
whose fatality would be a strategy something like the rule of another
game. Basically, the object mocks the laws we attach to it; it would
rather figure in our calculations as a sarcastic variable, and leave it
to the equations to verify themselves. But the rules of its game, the
conditions according to which it accepts playing? No one knows
them, and they can change without notice.

No one knows what a strategy is. There are not enough means
in the world for us to be able to dispose of ends. And, therefore, no
one is capable of articulating a final process. God himself is forced
to employ a trial-and-error method. The interesting thing about

For a Principle of Evil / 227

this is the inexorable logical process that is visible here, by which
the object is taken in the very game that we wanted to make it
play—doubling the ante somehow, escalating the bidding on the
strategic limits it will tolerate, installing thereby a strategy that
doesn’t have its own ends: a “playful” strategy that stills the play of
the subject, a fatal strategy in that the subject thereby succumbs to
the surpassing of its own objectives.

We are accomplices in this excess of finality that is there in the
object (this can be the excess of meaning, and therefore the impos¬
sibility of deciphering a word that plays the game of meaning all too
well). We invent all these strategies in the hope of having them
result in the unexpected event. The real we invent wholly in the
hope of seeing it result in a prodigious artifice. From any object we
hope for a blind response that hampers our projects. From strategy
we expect control. From seduction we look for surprise.

Seduction is fatal. It’s the effect of a sovereign object that recre¬
ates in you an original confusion and seeks to surprise you. Fatality,
in turn, is seductive, like the discovery of a hidden rule. The dis¬
covery of a hidden rule of the game is dazzling, and compensates
us in advance for the crudest losses.

Likewise with the joke. If I look for a fatal connection in lan¬
guage, I fall on the joke, which is itself the denouement of language
immanent to language (that is the fatal: the same sign presiding
over a life’s crystallization and its resolution, at the knotting of the
intrigue and its denouement). In language become pure object,
irony (of the Witz?) is the objective form of this denouement.
Everywhere, as in the Witz , redoubling and escalating the stakes are
spirited forms of denouement.

Everything must unfold in a fatal and ingenious way, just as
everything was caught from the start in an original subversion.

228 / Fatal Strategies

Even predestination is a form of ironic subversion of fatality.
Chance is also one. What’s the use of trying to establish chance as
an objective process, if it is an ironic one? Of course it exists, but
against all science, in the irony of the aleatory, and even at the
molecular level. And of course fatality exists too, simultaneously—
there’s no paradox involved in this. The difference is that the irony
of fatality is greater than the irony of chance, which just makes it
more tragic and more seductive.

It’s true that this is a difficult and obscure route: to side with the
object, to take up the cause of the object. To find another rule,
another axiom: nothing mystical in this, nothing of the other¬
worldly delirium of a subjectivity trapped and escaping headlong
into a paroxysmal inventory. But simply to delineate this other
logic, unravel those other strategies, leave the field open to objec¬
tive irony. That also is a challenge—eventually it threatens
absurdity, and runs the risk of what it describes—but the risk is to
be taken. The hypothesis of a fatal strategy must itself be fatal, too.

If there be a morality, it too must be engaged in the eccentric
cycle of its effects, must itself be hypermoral, like the real is hyper-
real, must be no longer a moral stasis, but a moral ecstasy, must
itself be a special effect.

Levi-Strauss claimed that the symbolic order had left us, yield¬
ing to history. Today, says Canetti, history itself has withdrawn.
What remains but to pass on the side of the object, and on the side
of its eccentric and precious effects, of its fatal effects (fatality is
only the absolute liberty of effects )? Semiorrhage.

Today, now that all critical radicality has become useless, now
that all negativity seems resolved in a world that pretends to realize
itself, and now that the critical spirit has found its summer home

For a Principle of Evil / 229

in socialism, and the effects of desire are largely depleted—what
remains but to bring things back to their enigmatic ground zero?
Now the enigma is inverted: once it was the Sphinx that posed men
the question of man, the question Oedipus thought he answered,
that we all thought we answered. Today it’s man that poses to the
Sphinx—the inhuman—the question of the inhuman, of the fatal,
of the indifference of the world toward our affairs, of its fickleness
toward objective laws. The object (the Sphinx), subtler than man,
hardly answers. But it’s certain nevertheless that in disobeying laws,
in unravelling desire, it answers secretly to some enigma. What
remains but to side with this enigma?

Everything can be summed up in this: let’s believe for a single
instant the hypothesis that there is a fatal and enigmatic bias in the
order of things.

In any case, there is something stupid about our current situa¬
tion. There’s something stupid in the raw event, to which destiny,
if it exists, could not be insensible. There’s something stupid in the
current forms of truth and objectivity that a superior irony could
spare us. Everything is expiated in one way or another. Everything
is headed somewhere. Truth only complicates things.

And if the Last Judgement consists, as everyone knows, for
each of us, in saving and eternalizing a moment of our lives, and
one only, with whom do we share this ironic end?

230 / Fatal Strategies

Jean Baudrillard

- • . Philippe Beitchman & W.G.J. Niesluchowski

Dominic Pettman

Two alternatives, equally possible: nothing has
happened yet, our unhappiness comes from
the fact that nothing has really begun (libera¬
tion, revolution, progress)—finalist utopia. The
other eventuality is that everything has already
happened. We are already beyond the end. All
that was metaphor has already materialized,
collapsed into reality. This is our destiny: the
end of the end. We are in a transfinite universe.

Fatal Strategies was first published in France in 1983, two years after Baudrillard’s
groundbreaking Simulations, with its dizzying descriptions of a world in which original
and copy, real and false have become indistinguishable. Fatal Strategies takes us one
step further with a paradoxical question: if plans of action have become ineffective,
can the hyperreal world we live in be challenged by another kind of logic that would
come with the inevitability of fate?

Outwardly geared to progress and production, ruled by linearity, cause and
effect, and accumulation, contemporary societies remain unaware that they have
already outgrown their raison d’etre and finalities. In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard is
looking for a rule immanent to the system, a fatal game (more final than final) capable
of dismantling, challenging, and reversing the world of simulation. Bypassing
subjectivity in favor of an “objective irony,” Baudrillard is here reinventing theory as
narration, a playful, provocative proposition, and all the more implacable for that.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and
theorist of postmodernity who Challenged all existing theories of contemporary
society with wit and rigor. An outsider to the French intellectual establishment, he is
internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.
His Simulations instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice
in the world of politics, philosophy, and art.

i SQlSli

distributed by The MIT Press
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-061-3

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